Because as far as I can tell, that battle was lost about 10 years ago.
That latter thing isn't really a benefit. Or if it is, it's satisfying your personal aesthetic sense. I too happen to think that past version of the future was awesome. But I also liked the future where we all used jetpacks to fly up to our long-haul zeppelins. That's no reason to ban airplanes.
To use your metaphor, this is not the future where air travel is cheap and ubiquitous; this is the future where the Concorde no longer flies, you must submit to a strip search to board an airline, and Meigs Field has been bulldozed.
I'm fascinated that you could work in tech and still manage to seize one small moment in technological time and declare it the peak of goodness. You realize, don't you that people do that with every moment of technological time?
I'm not denying that by your criteria the web was better then. I'm just saying that seizing upon the particular set of aesthetic criteria from the age when one is most impressionable and decrying all that comes after as worse has never been an effective way of changing things back.
Jetpacks aren't widespread for important safety and technical reasons. The existence of search engines demonstrates that non-browser agents are technically possible.
People are often perfectly happy to present content as content. But when their economic interests lead them to another approach, aesthetic outrage from a tiny minority won't change that.
I need to be able to alter my root certs and other things. I can even teach other people how to do this.
If this is hard to do, it should be made easy.
Resist turning your software into a tablet.
(My point vaguely being that the rulemaking behavior you seek to lampoon actually has leaked that far into real life)
The most obvious being you can still run while in the middle of a murder trial up to the point where your convicted. But, good luck getting elected.
One fundamental premise of free software is that users are responsible for the software running on their computer, and therefore have the right to make that software do what they want. They have the right to accept SSL certificates from who they want, to use the amount of disk space they want, and so on. And the fact that only a tiny minority of users understand the security implications of having China's root certificate installed in their browser is not an argument for taking away their option to uninstall it. It's an argument that SSL's trust model is severely broken.