You are right from a user's point of view.
But Jasem speaks from a developer's point of view. At some point, some inconsistancies may emerge, due to years of evolution step after step, that make the soft difficult to maintain and make evolve. And some choices may lead to a dead end.
So the best thing to do is to give back some logic to the whole thing by regrouping inside the same structure things that are now in separate places.
If I get what Jasem has in mind, regrouping things that have to be together under a different unique profile should simplify maintaining the separate "tabs" so when you modify something in one tab, you don't have to lose your hair because of secondary effects on other tabs
Plus, if you want to deal with parallel processing of several "optical trains", you really need to regroup things under a common flag first, before you can launch several instances of this "optical train".
So it's not about "reinventing the wheel", it's about making some place and order to allow future developments of a more stable software.
At some point, this evolution is probably necessary, even is it asks the users to leave their comfort range for a while ...
- Marc