I totally understand that, I'm not a young mind anymore, and I get that most of these are pointless superficial tricks. I spend most of my days venting about the state of computing (especially since web2.0 came and replaced a lot of stuff with bloated regressions in many offices)
But I considered readline a good addition, not a waste of time and neurons.
ps: I stopped using zsh/fish, my emacs theme is the vanilla theme.. you forget about these 'improvements', for real tasks they don't matter.