Nomen est omen?
In fact, you can already do the querying part using https://stedolan.github.io/jq/, I believe you can make modifications with it as well, but a different front end a la recins/recdel would make that a bit more convenient.
Some people like to keep it simple, others like to geek out on esoteric settings and full configurability. Personally I like when a software is upfront about who it's for, instead of pretending to cater to everyone's taste.
Even Windows comes in several flavors because one size doesn't fit all.
Could be worse. We could be building stuff on top of an operating system based on DOS.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
That certainly seems true, but does that mean it should be that way? FWIW I see "thinking" programmer as a senior engineer, and "shipping" programmers as juniors. The latter will eventually become the former, but they require training and nurturing to do so.
In my experience, that's very hard to find. I've worked for many companies and in my experience, the ones with a "sane" programmer culture are very, very rare. Most are dominated by the business and sales structures, and see the techs as a necessary evil that they'd rather ship overseas where the wages are lower.
Where are the companies that are committed to technical excellence?
When I first got into programming as a high school student about 20 years ago, I was fascinated by the intricacy and cleverness of it. I was reading stories of big inventions and clever hacks, such as making games fit into tiny amounts of RAM, or cutting the runtime of an algorithm in half by using a clever optimization. When software was shipped, it had to be finished, as it was damn near...