Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the poison in the open source world. If you have something that works "well enough" but never evolves, it holds everyone back. The barrier to entry is fairly high for an application like this, so I'm not saying this is an easy thing to fix, but it's worth fixing. Linux in particular is filled with "well enough" solutions that should be striving to be better. Although there's misfires when controversial things…
But whats wrong with PuTTY?, is it missing features?, I mean. like it has full SSH support, its easy to use, and has a non-quirky terminal emulator.. I guess it could have more terminal types, but there are closed source options for that, like Reflections.
Mostly it seems like overkill to run a ssh server + client to get a local terminal.