[drvdevd]

One reason terminal apps haven't moved on much, and one of the major challenges for any piece of software trying to act as a terminal emulator, is the number of escape sequences that must be supported for common emulation modes (e.g. even just vt10x I believe).

Thus over-engineering has been with us all along, much of it legacy cruft.

It might be worth considering abandoning traditional terminal emulation entirely in favor of something else if more features are desired.

Personally I think remote and virtualized devices (think qxl/spice, remote audio, etc), could use some love. We have the bandwidth to improve on these technologies today.