All those are tools that make certain jobs a lot less complex. I dare say you either use them for the wrong job or you should try expanding the size of your skull.
We demand actual proofs of program correctness, but for some reason we don't even ask for proofs that practices actually work or even that they don't do any harm. We just take it on intuition and faith, and propagate practices by peer pressure. If it looks fancy, and people like it on HN, it must be better. I don't know in what sense this is "engineering."
Some people do actually gather evidence in this area. The best collection of it I have found so far is the book Making Software: What Really Works and Why We Believe It.
But you see, said skull is constantly buffeted by the paradoxes of the following three EWD maxims:
1. "The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull";
2. "I realized that my prior projects were just finger warm-ups. Now I have to tackle complexity itself. But it took long, before I had assembled the courage to do so."
3. "Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?"
