> It smells like the thinking is that you (the developer) can grab from a collection of very broad data connectors, and the agent will be able to figure out what to do with them without much custom logic in between.

This has always been the idea behind tools/function calling in LLMs.

What MCP tries to solve is the NxM problem - every LLM vendor has their own slightly different protocols for specifying and calling tools, and every tool supplier has to handle at least one of them, likely with custom code. MCP aims to eliminate custom logic at the protocol level.