It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels.
And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.
Personally, I feel skills+CLI is better, since only the description of the skill enters the context window until it’s required and CLIs should support help flags which will allow you do have progressive discovery.
And a CLI is also easy to use yourself.
First, it matters how well the MCP is written; a well-written one won't be so massive
Secondly, different sessions should load different MCPs. Load only what is needed
Thirdly, if you're finding you need a dozen MCPs, you need to consolidate that into a single service that does the work and then presents a single, unified API (via MCP) to your agent
Finally, start using models with 1M context window limits. I really don't know how people can stand being stuck at a limit like 272K.