I’ve configured it to use a real MySql server, instead of an embedded one, and I’ve set the backups to run daily and logrotate to rotate them up to one week. This is the minimal that I would consider for avoiding loosing all the hard work you’ve put on song rating.

I understand your point of view, and would just like to comment on one point.
You say, “part of this has to do with the BDFL model in Vim. Bram Moolenar has done a tremendous job in bringing Vim to the stage where it is. People can and have forked Vim in the past. But for one reason or another, Vim has stayed Vim, and its development trajectory has been slow and incremental.”

I see no difference between Vim and Emacs/RMS in this respect. Many “fights” have been seen on emacs dev. maillist, and often RMS disregards the opinions of others with “I see it this way. So it shall be.” (literal quote from some I encountered once).

To me, needing to issue a TERMINAL COMMAND is HELLISHLY more complex than it needs to be. It is not “simple” by any stretch of the imagination. You COULD use Powershell/CMD to do crap like this but the point is that in Windows basic stuff like this is EASY to do and follows LOGICAL, PREDICTABLE steps.

Obviously, as someone who has debugged hundreds of thousands of lines of assembly in IDA Pro, it’s not “hard” for me to use the terminal to show hidden files or create an archive, but I really don’t care about whether it’s “hard” for me. The point is that it is outrageously harder IN COMPARISON to Windows to achieve the same thing (create a simple Zip file without added thumbnails/metadata). Using a command line to accomplish things is virtually NEVER easier unless you (a) have a photographic memory (b) there is no other way. Unix/Linux/Ubuntu did not become more popular/usable by ELIMINATING graphical options.

Saying “oh here’s the solution, just download a third party application to correct the problem” is basically agreeing that Mac has failed to do anything better than the competition, since that is basically how Windows/nix work. The whole point of Mac is ALLEGEDLY that is does things better/more simply out of the box, but in fact it requires terminal commands to make basic changes…

There are a couple solutions here. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1640973?start=0&tstart=0

IMHO, VII hit the nail on the head when he said that Mac is going mainstream. It invalidates the “We are not stupid” point as well. As Mac tries to sell itself to the average stupid user more and more, expect crap like this. Your best bet is to just use the command line, or roll your own script, which were made for the smart user.

The “Redundant” point is a memory/CPU time tradeoff. Rather than have a user recreate this metadata from files, which takes CPU time, it’s stored in the zip file and available immediately to the user after it’s unzipped. There is a legitimate reason for this, then. That said, I agree the metadata could probably be stuffed into the archive somehow that gets ignored by normal zip programs and picked up by the Mac zip program.