Almost a decade has passed since the OMG has issued the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative. It soon became obvious that raising the level of abstraction in development and reasoning at the model level would help in asking the right questions at the right time. Based on a concrete problem, we discuss four alternative solutions to a multi-language system design problem. These solutions use a traditional approach, a technique based on modeling, a domain-specific approach, and a mix of modeling and domain-specific techniques, respectively. The solutions depend on the problem, but they are representative for the situations we encounter in practice, therefore giving us a good basis for a larger discussion on the appropriateness of using modeling techniques and on the place of MDA in current software engineering practice and design.