[t43562]

There was a time when I was working on AIX, Solaris and HPUx as well as Linux. In that situation it paid to install gnu tools everywhere (especially bash, make and sed!!) or build versions of them in my home dir so I could have them on any machine.

In THAT situation the constant pain of differences in behaviour was reduced by selecting a common nonstandard tool. It is really the same argument that you're making: that being able to work roughly the same everywhere has great value.