And they punished those of us who make them visible again, by having the "edit filename" function mix the extension with the filename, even though wanting to change the extension is about 100 times more rare than wanting to change the characters right before the extension.

I've seen a nice version of this in linux somewhere - when you push F2 two boxes come up and the cursor is positioned in the one to the left of the dot but you can move across to it easily.

EDIT: Ah, this is available in windows 7 too. Nice, finally.