Comment by kps
11 hours ago
Star didn't have cut/copy/paste. Instead it had ‘copy to’ and ‘move to’ operations on the current selection, more like today's drag-and-drop. Some influential people decided that invisible fragile clipboard state was better than a copy/move-in-progress state.
A 2012 historical retrospective on the subject from Larry Tesler (the NOMODES man himself): https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/FundHCI/2013/papers/Tesler-CutCo...
The issue he had with the “move to” operation is that it forced you into a mode where you had to pick a destination right away. I wonder if OP’s proposal was ever brought up at the time—it does seem like a promising middle ground!
Probably was seen as too modal. Modal UI was very unfashionable for a while.