Harlan echoed some of my own feelings in a recent post of his:

…I keep coming back to the same thought…that the best tool available to an analyst is that grey matter between their ears.

…Over the years, knowing how things work and knowing what I needed to look for really helped me a lot…it wasn’t a matter of having to have a specific tool as much as it was knowing the process and being able to justify the purchase of a product, if need be.

Totally agree. This should apply to IT in general. If the tools replace knowledge, then you become a slave to the tool and it’s capabilities and weaknesses or lose the ability to ever work around the inevitable gaps of these tools.