I can't speak to specifics of tmux/screen but, generally, one approach to this problem is to pick tools with the defaults you want. If a tool doesn't have good defaults, pick one that does. Sure, you have to be pragmatic about this—if no tool has good defaults, just pick the one with the best (and the best support for configuration...)
Well, it obviously depends on which tools you're talking about. For some types—terminal emulators, text editors—there are so many choices with near-identical feature sets that this approach can make sense.
Yeah exactly, in the said example, tmux survived because it had better features - who uses screen today? The key bindings confusion was a fixable annoyance. We weight pros and cons quite often and not necessarily based on a default configuration
