You need to escalate? Hmm, last 50 patches I installed said they were to stop someone from having complete control heh.

The average Linux and BSD user, have multiple accounts on their machines:

I have books going back to about 1999 and 2000 for Linux AND BSD, and they all talk about setting up the machine once it's installed. All of them mention you need to make a non root account for you to use. Windows on the other hand, you install and it logs in as admin as soon as the install is finished. A lot of people don't ever make another account, they use Admin accounts. and some even auto log in. So having admin logged in and no where does it say you should create another account that isn't admin. In other words, even if it doesn't let you do that, editing a text file as guest isn't a problem when most people leave only the default admin account on the machine to begin with.

Also, the nobody user, doesn't have as many real access points. And most of the stuff you install right now, like, for example, the newest version of BSD, isn't going to let "nobody" do much of anything. The idea behind the nobody account is a good one in my book.

Also, most Linux distros don't let the nobody account do too much either. I think I have seen some versions where nobody had access to certain system files, which is, as you said, a bad idea, but I don't think it takes but 5 minutes to fix that.