>>3970611There isn't a single lens that does everything well, although not everybody needs to photograph every type of situation. I think that even if you only own a couple lenses, many people will likely end up with some focal length overlap.
Fast primes in the 35-200mm focal length range are usually good for portraits, and can be good for general use if you like the idea of "zooming with your feet" or just limiting your focal length to stimulate your creativity, but outside of being a fixed focal length, these lenses might not actually be good for macro. A lot of sharp lenses become soft at their minimum focus distances.
With zooms, obviously the main limitation is aperture. The fastest zooms are the heaviest, and the fastest zooms are never as fast as the fastest primes. Size, speed and sharpness are both weighed against one another with zoom lenses, and some people might prefer different lenses for different occasions. Something like a 24-120mm f/4 lens is going to be useful for travel, but also relatively big and heavy. If you don't need the telephoto end, then a 24-70mm f/3.5-5.6 is going to be way more portable, and likely good enough to cover 95% of your needs in most situations.
Some people who shoot telephoto (and who have enough money for it) might own a fast telephoto lens, like a 500mm f/4 or 400mm f/2.8, but they might also own a slow telephoto zoom, like a 100-400mm f/3.5-6.3 and use that with a teleconverter, just because it's going to be much more portable carrying around the slow zoom lens than an $11,000 space-shuttle-colored, fixed focal length telescope.
