Why does MCP involve so many separate components in one query?

Yes, the full flow involves many steps, but each component has a clear responsibility. Your application handles user-facing logic. The MCP client abstracts away the complexity of server communication, including the protocol's wire format, the transport choice, and the message exchange. The MCP server owns the integration with one external service. Claude itself owns the reasoning about which tool to call and how to interpret results. This separation means each piece can evolve independently. You can swap one MCP server for another, change transport without touching your application code, or update Claude's behavior without rewriting integrations.