Yes, it's totally a design problem that users are fucking with files in a system hidden folder. I do that all the time, easy mistake to make.
Which has both the hidden and the system flag set. You have to change two explorer settings to even access the directory, one of said changed gives you a prompt warning you that it might be dangerous to enable it.
*nix: "Go for it, edit what you want, just be aware you can fuck up"
Windows: "what the fuck are you doing in the special area? get out!"
What's the solution? Put less warnings? Then you'd get even more people destroying their data. Put more warnings? Then you'd get more people complaining that "Windows doesn't let you edit what you want!".
It doesn't really seem like they can win.
Uneducated users should be responded to with "WTF were you doing?" as computer is a precision machine and it is not unreasonable to expect some basic level of literacy.
vacri@thingy:~$ rm /sbin/init
rm: cannot remove ‘/sbin/init’: Permission denied
If I've elevated myself to be a global administrative user, then I should be able to do global administrative things, without being treated as an 'uneducated user'.
> it is not unreasonable to expect some basic level of literacy
I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect some level of literacy for administrative-level tasks, and that's what nix does.
One of my favorite Windows v. Linux things is when Linux users try to work in Windows, and try and do things that would be perfectly normal in Linux, and then wonder why their Windows box is so unstable. I once ran across someone who tried putting their Windows\system32 folder into a version control app. When their Windows registry exploded spectacularly, their response was that this was a normal thing to do on a Linux box.
Windows and Linux take very different engineering approaches to things, so skills developed in one don't necessarily translate well to the other.
And, of course, ZFS boot environments are the same sort of idea to an extent.