> It’s a lot easier to maintain an orthogonal design when your software isn’t being used. Software that gets used becomes less orthogonal and develops diagonal shortcuts.

Yep, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Human language is exactly the same way. Irregular verbs, contractions, and slang are all diagonal shortcuts.

There may be a few unneeded adornments to some Unix utilities, I agree. But remember that the `ls -l` that you might have typed in 1980 on a minicomputer running BSD still has the same output as the `ls -l` from a PC running Linux in 2012. That's just awesome backcompat right there.