In this context...

"specialized" = Do one thing

"flexible" = and do it well.

That said, the key ingredient of the Unix philosophy that is missing isn't specialised, flexible tools, it's composability of those tools. Imagine if you couldn't pipe grep output to another program, wouldn't it be a lot less useful? I'd say so.

There are ways we can get around this, but they would require a fair amount of development time. To give you one example, consider how the JACK audio server allows programs to share audio streams. Similar data streaming arrangements could be made for other types of data.