I think parent was referring to BRL-CAD, which is very much feels like a collection of cli tools ducktaped together.
I was just commenting on my general impression of the sorts of tools I saw other folks in the lab using, or that I had to use in my classes. I’m more of a programming guy anyway, so it is probably an issue of me being an uninformed neighbor (all of the responses seem to indicate that I’m wrong mostly, which is definitely not surprising).