We're supposed to idolize this as some sort of hyper-enlightened version of interface design? Hell no.
I get that this design worked for Raskin. It worked for him the same way that my hacked version of GNU Emacs' next-line function does for me when the cursor is at the end of the buffer, or how I needed a version of its delete-horizontal-space but that would work only after the cursor.
I get that Raskin's "oh, you probably made a mistake, let me do something else that I suspect is what you really meant" might even have worked for a bunch of other people too. But the idea that somehow Raskin had some sort of deep insight with stuff like this, rather than just a set of personal preferences that are like those of anyone else, is just completely wrong, I think.