I suppose rms can't understand why anybody would think anything could be better than what he chose to do 40-something years ago.
Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense.
It’s better to standardize on something, but that something isn’t necessarily better and is often worse.
Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally arbitrary (C-y). It makes sense (and cua-mode offers it) to offer the opportunity to rebind the keys to the mainstream arbitrarily selected shortcuts, but it also makes sense to keep what's been used by emacs users for 40 years since that's what they're used to at this point (oh hell, I've been using it for 20 years, time has flown).
And shortcuts based on finger distance must suck for anyone using a non-qwerty keyboard (especially a non-latin character based language!).
DOS editors often used WordStar bindings. C-k C-b to start a block, C-k C-c to copy or C-k C-v to move. Turbo Pascal used these bindings. They're also the default bindings for the `joe` editor.