I'm not referring to the kernel at all. It's the morass of the userland—three decades of catering to the expectations of IBM PC/windows users have led to... inconsistent and underwhelming results. If I wanted to use 1980s UX, I would have switched to windows or linux decades ago.

But what am I saying? Consistent emacs bindings across all text forms is actually from the 1970s. Maybe I'm the problem....