Establishing better defaults in an application is never a bad move. Power users can still customize things to make them behave in whatever way they want, and ne

Establishing better defaults in an application is never a bad move. Power users can still customize things to make them behave in whatever way they want, and newbies benefit from a better default setup. This doesn't mean dumbing down the UX. The goal is to provide a better ramp from newbie to power user, so that newcomers can quickly benefit from some of the cool features without having to study for a week before being able to do the most basic things. This is how Vim does it, actually. If you keep it in insert mode, it's like a basic text editor, usually with the terminal itself taking care of basic copy-paste. Eventually, people begin dropping out to normal mode to use more and more commands.