The concept of 'mcp server' is a brittle abstraction that need not exist.
A 'skill' is utterly superior in every sense: a 'right sized abstraction for whatever it is you're trying to do' - that can include cli / rest - and other key bits of information.
Your skills or CLIs still need to call a backend endpoint at some point. MCP is just a standard server JSON-RPC protocol. Having a standard for that is really nice, you get standardize auth, discovery, API shape, etc.
Is it the greatest RPC design ever, no, most annoying is how it's based around a statefull session. But it's really awesome that we have a standard. Otherwise you'd just have a bunch of random servers all doing their own things that you'd have to figure out how they work and all, it would be much worse.
If MCP did not exist today, we wold not invent it.
We'd probably hormonize in basic conventions around json calls, and not much more.
The rest would just be api use / instructions.
LLMS to day are exceedingly good at calling RESTful APIs, the MCP standard provides little advantage.
The advantage of 'skills' is that they are more generic - an Enterprise LLM can evoke 'capabilities' which may or may not involved rpc type calls, and if they do, there will be varying level of instructions provided.
There's almost not point to MCP.
You’re arguing against MCP but have nothing to offer that isn’t nearly the same thing.