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  >   Still I'd suggest to allow users to
  > > separately choose for both, 'y-or-n-p' _and_ 'yes-or-no-p' dialogues,
  > > whether they want Emacs to handle them in a modal or non-modal way.

That would have these drawbacks

* It would mean extra complexity to debug, maintain, and document

* It would not directly provide the old behavior, only a basis for it.
  People who want that would have to implement that.

Does anyone really WANT this generality, or is it generality for
generality's sake?

  > Indeed.  Here is a possible way to make the minibuffer modal:

  > (defun minibuffer-lock ()
  >   (when (active-minibuffer-window)
  >     (select-window (active-minibuffer-window))))

I am not sure what behavior that would give.
But I think it is NOT the behavior that y-or-n-p used to
have, which was to reject unexpected answers.

What was the reason for implementing this change in the
single-character-answer commands?  Who actually wanted the change in
behavior?  And for what use cases?

If people really like the new behavior, I won't argue against it.
But maybe we should turn it off by default, like recursive minibuffers.

--
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)