Features are, like it or no, where the value is.
If you want colours you can pipe it through a sed script.
If you want to sort it in some way you could pipe it to sort or something.
No system is ever going to do everything everyone wants. The Unix solution is to allow you to easily add the things you do want.
And yet here we are, with ls having builtin support for color, sorting and more.
I see the other way around. Additional features are people's special cases and hobby-horses, and unlikely to be used by other people. BUT each new feature/interface/etc adds the potential for (and really of) more bugs.
Perhaps it should be "features are where the security holes are"? :)