I want my terminal to be as simple, and dumb, as possible.

It should ignore unexpected inputs and formats. It should not know what a web page or an image file is.

It should have no idea what it is displaying nor what is happening on the remote end ... I don't want it to know I am more'ing or less'ing or paging, etc. Just show the output.

I feel so strongly about this that I am sometimes tempted to collapse output to ascii-256. I resist this temptation because I sometimes cut and paste foreign URLs ... which my terminal has no idea is a URL.

I see your point and I think it is a valid opinion, I just wanted to point out that if you are cosplaying as rsync, you are doing it right :-)