I think I agree with you, that it's (for those who actually do like Unix) a discoverability problem, but then I think that can be helped by simply reducing the number of command line tools. If you have a small set of tools you know extremely well, the pipelines necessary become immediately obvious whenever you encounter a task... I think part of the problem is that many modern Unix commands are non-orthogonal. It would be interesting to look at ways to improve the discoverability of manpages, though, or at least have some kind of well-structured "if you want to X, you could use Y" index.