I also noted the Orwellian tone. We live in troubling times when the value of tinkering is lost to the tinkerers themselves.

Tinkering was never important to real hackers. It's the script kiddie analogue to hacking.

No, it's a real example on "focus on what matters" and dropping support for bike-shedding (all too popular with tinkerers).

Many users are not college students discovering the world of UNIX and customization and tinker happy -- they're people that want to get something (not "how the computer works" related) done.