Meanwhile, long experience has shown that making things configurable instead of just removing features leads to... bugs and misconfiguration. There's a reason why this is widely considered an antipattern in UI; it should be an antipattern in code as well. Not every feature needs to exist, and if not enough people use something, or if it interferes with other features more often than it's directly used (as I suspect is the case with backspace), then it should be removed.
Look at something like Photoshop — the level of configuration options is immense, but thousands of professionals use it daily without issue. It just has sensible defaults that can be restored easily.
Most of the people I know who work with it just barely tolerate its UI and its incessant bugs. Wonder if that has anything to do with trying to support everything everyone ever thought of? :)