> I'd even appreciate a "trash mode" for rm as default. Then you do something like "rm purge" and only then it actually kills everything put in between calls. Tons of user documents would have saved that way, instead of "just be careful because that's how we always did things". And of course some --doitnow flag could just delete stuff immediately.

That will break a large chunk of scripts that use rm. Say someone with sufficient clout implemented this, dumped the information into some release notes, even made it widely known via various internet forums.

Inevitably, what will happen is that we get a split: some who do not want to use the "improved" tool as they have other more pressing concerns, and others who view it as progress.

If anything, there is already a ton of fragmentation even in such basic utilities found in coreutils (BSD vs GNU differences, not immediately available on Windows, etc).

And the funny thing is that even if unity is practically achieved for some time, someone will want to scratch a new itch, repeating the cycle.