On the other hand, I would guess it's not just the maintainers being entrenched: If you were to redefine something like C-v to perform "+p by default, you would

On the other hand, I would guess it's not just the maintainers being entrenched: If you were to redefine something like C-v to perform "+p by default, you would upset every guy that has been using Vim for some time. Not only that, but you would also really ruin the day for everyone that regularly uses it through SSH and counts on Vim's default behavior. I would guess the reactions would be orders of magnitude more vile than those to, say, systemd. So, leaving such rebindings as opt-in possibilities to newcomers seems like a much more sane decision to me.