I don't see why restricting yourself to an array of monospaced characters is necessarily a good thing. You can make an argument that keyboard control is superior to mouse control but there's no reason why a graphical app can't be controlled by the keyboard.

In fact, you can trivially make any existing interactive CLI app better by recreating it exactly in an X window and adding a few graphically intuitive elements like icons and nice rounded tabs/scrollbars. And you can use proportional fonts- it's been proven that humans can read proportional fonts more quickly than fixed-width fonts.

https://i.imgur.com/WAmklLE.png