Minor point of contention: There was no "Germany" to have "national heroes" in 1795. F.A. Wolf was Prussian.
Prussia, in turn, was very much in love with classicism (like pretty much everybody at the time), which pretty much amounts to worshipping Hellenic and Roman culture.
I'm sorry, but this is rubbish. You are talking about editing a file in /usr, which means your fix is guaranteed to break at the next upgrade. And this is not "easy". Or at least not "easy" in the sense that Gnome "is not meant for users who don't want to select their terminal emulators". This is neither discoverable nor maintainable.
What's wrong with sane defaults and a configuration panel?
Had Homer been german, they would never have questioned a national hero.