Horses for courses. These tools originated with linux kernel maintainers. I remember sending a patch to improve Andrew Morton's patch scripts, and he told me it was "slow". I was using a dumb algorithm for something, and so I asked him how many patches he had in his stack, and I don't remember the precise number, but I remember that it was in the thousands! My algorithm worked fine with 10 or 100 patches, but thousands? Hadn't occurred to me someone would be dealing with such a pile.

I haven't had a pile that big myself, but I have had a pile that was in the low 100s.