>> a good reminder that it's a pretty simple universal tool interface.
That's because it's not really doing anything new. MCP is a land-grab by one company, quickly supported by the rest as they desperately work to abstract and supplant with their own "protocols". Welcome to the era of thin veneers that add little but complexity over what we already had.
Land grab? Not sure I'd call it that, but maybe it is.
I looked at it more as there were N different ways of configuring tools to be called, so they created N+1 (https://xkcd.com/927/) but have had good success at getting alignment on it.
While not knowing the reasons that OpenAI supported it, I would imagine it was along the lines of: "This is not more bad than the others we have seen, may as well use it"
Since that time, thankfully many folks have jumped into looking at it and making it better. I just wish the spec was good and easy to follow (I read through it, and I'm still looking for the real spec)