I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.
Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.
This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).
The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…