An excellent rant. I hope you feel better for writing it!! I feel better for reading it :-)
But RPED? I only ever saw that on Amstrad PC1512/1640 MS-DOS disks. A quick'n'dirty, nice simple editor :-)
Because it was so small and fast to load, I copied and used that for config.sys/autoexec.bat editing on every system and MSDOS version after that, especially anything that had to be booted from floppy :-)
Nowadays, it's whatever the default editor on FreeBSD is when you type "edit", or if on some version of Linux, nano. Anything more complex than editing a simple config file or simple script gets done in a "proper" modern GUI editor.