One (wo)man’s brittle special case is another’s generalization. There are many different levels of abstraction. One can be at the rigorous level on some dimensions and at the post-rigorous level on others. In the other direction, many things that once required post-rigorous thinking are now sufficiently codified so that they now require only rigorous thinking. There’s not a well-defined body of “standard tools.”
One (wo)man’s brittle special case is another’s generalization. There are many different levels of abstraction. One can be at the rigorous level on some dimensions and at the post-rigorous level on others. In the other direction, many things that once required post-rigorous thinking are now sufficiently codified so that they now require only rigorous thinking. There’s not a well-defined body of “standard tools.”