I think it would be useful is Emacs had some more general hooks than
the ones it has a present, for example:-
progmodes-hook - A hook ran whenever a programming language mode starts
plain-text-modes-hook - A hook ran by text-mode,
paragraph-indent-text-mode etc
formatted-text-modes-hook - A hook ran by tex-mode, nroff-mode,
sgml-mode etc
This would provide the functionality with less code than hooking many
modes. It would avoid the problem of weird minor modes affecting
temporary buffers and things like M-x snake.
I might write that sometime, but I can't right now.