Well, part of me smells troll tracks in this post, but I'll play along.

I EDC an LM Supertool and Micra, but I consider myself rural despite being a professional geek. Any of our Vermont members will tell you, we have rural and we have small parts of the Burlington area that you can drive through in less than an hour on the surface roads. Assuming you don't have to stop for moose to make up their minds.

Some every day, and not so every day, usages my various multis have had over the years, by part:

Pliers
-Picking up things that are hot/sharp/generally nasty
-pulling porcupine quills (OUCH!) and large thorns, plucking feathers
-tightening wire
-improving your grip on wet/oily paracord or vines when tieing knots
-improving your grip on small and wet/oily metal or plastic bits
-cracking certain small nuts and seeds
-crimping various metal and plastic items
-cutting wire
-breaking zip ties and similiar closure items
-twisting various kinds of bolts (and if you don't think that is a survival situation, you've never had a battery cable wiggle loose in the middle of the night at 10 below on a back back road)

File
-smoothing metal edges to protect you or gear
-sharpening machete (you could sharpen other blades with it, too)
-filings from a mag bar or some other source of magnesium or aluminum for starting a fire
-putting a point on something hard
-striker for strike anywhere matches when most stuff is wet

Saw
-Shaping wood or rigid plastic (includes shelter building)
-spine for striking on ferro rod
-spine for scaling fish
-spine for other light scraping duties
-tip has a notch- use it for removing hooks from fish, certain VERY find scraping

Knife blades
-back up, not the main reason I carry the thing. But you always have a back up- redundancy is life, that is why you have two lungs

Screwdrivers
-if it can screw together, it will unscrew if you give it time
-largest, for prying open freshwater mussels and the like
-smallest, sharp enough to use as awl or gouge

Can opener
-the obvious reason
-gutting blade (not the best, but it works for fish)
-scraping on small wood (trap triggers and the like)

Scissors
-they're scissors
-cutting, stripping light wire

Ruler scribed on the outside of the handle
-What do you normally do with a ruler?
-I can't think of a single non-urban use, honestly

Yes, you can fake a lot of this with a knife blade- you can scrape, pry, tighten screws, and try to cut through a 3" tree limb. But that edge is a valuable survival tool, I'd rather not dull or chip it (or break it) when I may need to be able to count on it before I can sharpen it. As a result, I carry a tool that does more than just cut, along with at least one that only cuts (aka, a knife). And I've never found the weight to be an issue, not for what I'm getting. I own good single blade folders that weigh as much and don't have as many tricks up their sleeve.

So, I guess my counter question is this:
Why not a multitool (or SAK and a small pair of pliers) for EDC and survival?

From another perspective, most people don't carry knives any more and never seem to have any serious handicap. Why do you carry a knife? I don't need to know the answer, I just want you to think it through, and apply your answer to the question of "why a multitool".