This really hits at a core of what I call developer vs. sysadmin perspective. A developer usually works in a persistent environment they fully control. A sysadmin does a lot of work on multiple, often short-lived servers. So the former prefers customizing things the way they like; the latter learns and sticks to defaults.

At one of the Lisp projects I worked on, this split was clearly visible. One of my co-workers had the dev perspective, the other had the sysadmin view. Both used Emacs and Slime, but one had it fully customized, and other had it bare-bones, and spent most of his time in raw terminal anyway.

(I, of course, am hard down on developer view. My Emacs config has no peers :)).