This issue is completely orthogonal to whether or not a GUI was in use. The text UI could just have easily asked for confirmation, and a graphical UI could easily allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot.
Even though I agree with your statement, do you truly believe that if a GUI had presented the options Yes/No/Cancel/Force or whatever, that less people would have suffered from issues like this? I probably would have used that --force flag on a non production system and a GUI would even make that decision more easy for me...
Well, the thing is that it complained about only one particular file which I didn't care and knew it was safe to --force on it. So, basically, you type:
foo -abc
And it tells you, "Can't alter file bar.conf".
After a google search you read, "bar.conf needs the --force switch to be altered".
So you're like, fine..
foo -abc --force
* Everything crash *
Next reboot,
"Press <enter> to get in the shell"
Me pressing enter.. and even the keyboard isn't working.