I find the older utilities are more "ergonomically pleasing" and improve "quality of life" given the generally poor quality of today's software. Indeed the "switching cost" would be high, as I would lose the ergonomic pleasure and quality of life improvement, not to mention the level of efficiency and productivity, I get from the "classic" UNIX utilities.
The real reason people are hesitant to use new tools is that there is a massive switching cost for most of them.