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.