Hi Dan (hope you don't mind),

The reason you have so many people replying saying that your shortcuts are a crutch is because you and I belong to a different group of people than they do.

Allow me to expand.

Unix people are conformists. By "unix people" I mean people that defend Unix constantly.
Quick evidence that they are conformists: "where's Plan 9?"
More evidence: unix utilities have the same crappy interface they had when they were created.

Think about this: Unix is based on the idea that programs should talk to each other via text (strings).
Do you know of anything less structured than a string? A string is a bunch of bytes next to each other. And I don't mean that in a "well, look at how the computer represents it" kind of way (where everything is a bunch of bytes next to each other); I mean that a string is literally the representation of bytes next to each other.

When you call a utility on the command line, say tar, and pass it zxcfvg or whatever that crap is, then pass it a filename, there's no structure here. The program 'tar' is receiving a big string containing what you just wrote: "tar zxcfvg filename.tar.gz". In fact, even more moronically, you receive that data already cut up in pieces as an array, so: ["tar", "zxcfvg", "filename.tar.gz"]. Which means you actually were passed information that is worse than a string since you've now lost information (the spaces). Wow, thanks, Unix, for splitting a string on its spaces. Real handy.

Unix believes on this very flawed idea that strings are a good data structure.
Remember Tcl? It was great. Then we came up with slightly better abstractions (Perl) and people ran the fuck away from Tcl as fast as they could. Tcl and Unix are based on the same flawed idea: strings are an OK structure. Tcl and Unix were both wrong. Strings suck.

You know what's a good interface? Messages. Look at Smalltalk.

This is what a good OS would look like (good, not great - plus I'll be exaggerating the messages to make my point clearer):

filename.tar.gz expandYourself
or
filename.tar.gz becomeAFreakingFolder
or
filename.mysteryextension expandYourselfWhateverYouAre,IDon'tCareIfIt'sBzipOrGzipOrBlahZip,JustDoIt,YouShouldBeResponsibleForYourself.

and instead of always having to google if ln -s takes the pointer or pointee first, it'd be this:

existing-file.ext createSoftSymlinkAt: new-name-at-new-location-maybe.ext

Unix people are conformists. They don't want change. They want to type tar xgvzg. Let them. Don't waste your breath.

Even Plan 9, the "good unix", is shortsighted. The gimmick is that "everything is a file". Shame, missed it again. Files are dumb. Our friend filename.tar.gz still doesn't know how to manage itself. Files are the wrong abstraction - not enough. How can they never have thought of objects? Because they're conformists. Not too much change, please! Just make more things be files. That'll win Unix people's hearts. And even that failed. Do you see now? Even such a tiny change failed to win over the unix people. You will not convince them that abstracting the behavior they fawn over is a good idea. They don't understand the concept. They're still writing scripts. You know what a script is? A recipe. You know who programs in recipes? Procedural programmers. When you let procedural programmers make an OS you end up with a system where scripts talk to each other via strings. Uhm, gross.

Let it be known that I use a Unix everyday (Mac OS X) and I think it's the best OS we have (I mean Unix, not Mac OS X). Nothing gets close. Still, it's FAR away from good. Smalltalk is good. If Smalltalk were an OS then I'd consider Unix "absolute garbage of the nastiest kind".

Keep abstracting away. If you want, later on when you have nothing to do, go ahead and print the man pages for tar. Read them start to finish. Study them deeply. Even marry them and go on a honeymoon trip together. Then you'll look good to a bunch of internet strangers. Or come with me and appreciate the view from high up our tower of abstractions. Unix people look like ants from here.