But lack of useful features = lower quality, so you're just arguing for a permanent state of poor quality for some strange change-resisting reason and the fact that alternatives exist (so? why should that stop your alternative from becoming better?)

No. Adding superfluous features to an intentionally minimal baseline program defacto reduces it's quality by making it less suitable for its task and more likely to have defects.

There's decades worth of options for fatter editors out there. Tools like nano (and now edit) is ubiquitous because they are not such editors, and people need a reliable baseline without such features.