There exist tools outside of your apparent zone of comfort that let us do whatever we damn please from the command line. I think you'd be surprised how much user facing code was written using Emacs/Vim.
Well, speak for yourself. About the same time, our local university had very impressive Irix X-terminals with a rock solid GUI.
It might be that you have only had a small glimpse of the things beyond PCs back then. And that seems to still have an impact on your perception of things on the "Unix" side ;)
I would have rather used the GUI tooling of a NeXT, which eschews the UNIX traditions even though it builds partially on top of them, than the Solaris way of programming GUIs, if given the option.
Just because I could only access green phosphor terminals, doesn't mean I wasn't aware of other, more expensive, options.
