Is this a joke? Or is it someone just trying to push their ideology of what they think should be done to the rest of the world to make their idea a standard?

Wow, that was my same response when I upgraded my box and Gnome3 was installed (removing my very customized setup of Gnome2).

I love mc!

I use it all the time for patch management. One little tidbit that most people do not know about mc is that you can cd into a patch. Edit the diffs in the patch, and copy a diff from one patch to another patch file, just like copying or moving a file.