For some purposes, awk+xargs can replace hours of work to write a tool to automate some process. It's my go-to for ops work that I don't expect to live very long and just needs to _happen_.
If one considers the idea of map reduce to be taking a set of data and ending up with a subset that is relevant, I've used tons of simple things to do that, and never Hadoop.
I think parsing logs to find pain areas or potential exploit/exfil is a map reduce job, for instance, and grep or awk can manage that just fine.
Also, happy 1337 karma day :).