I am not an IT professional and neither is my dad. I discovered linux through virtual machines on the cloud that you can connect through vnc and fell in love with the commandline.
Plan 9 does the job. GNU is better for the end user. But if I had to maintain that stuff I would definitely want to maintain the Plan 9 code and not the GNU code.
Perhaps someone can implement something w3mimage or sixels in btop for pannable graphs. Don't know how efficient that is.