I've not used an Apple in a long time, but I'm assuming the line editor heritage from the mainframes used to program the first one carried through.
It's a difference in mindset. I'm a fan of TECO, which is older than EMACS and even weirder. So, I can get along with almost anything better than the hell of loading data by toggle switches.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/546/apple...
Radio Shack's TRS-80 editor is also not that great either.
The Apple 1 had no editor or video RAM (it used shift registers). Maybe it was a legacy.
Apple BASIC did have better commands than the Commodore for example for graphics. So why did Commodore not do that?