It's true, sometimes it is possible to have an insight which solves multiple weakly related problems at once, but it's very rare and tends to require a paradigm change, like the Einstein's willingness to discard the fixed background space on which everything else happens. But this is basically the difference between art and craft. If you want to have systematic progress, you hack around the edges. It is certainly a good thing to occasionally try to bite through the problem as a whole if you have a flash of inspiration. What is not OK is to get stuck with a mouthful unable to chew through and unwilling to spit it out. Gah, metaphors. I am not qualified to judge whether your UDT solves every problem you say it does, as I have a strong aversion to anthropics, due to their poor testability, but it does not seem like a paradigm shift to me.