Apple not helping... deleting Time Machine snapshots

"It has never been advised to tamper..." Well, perhaps if I spent my time memorizing technical manuals. But the promise of the Apple GUI and environment is that it is relatively intuitive. An accessory to being intuitive is that if, for perfectly legitimate technical reasons, some part of the UI does not follow the rest, your Mac will gently warn you away if you try to do what would usually work... say, getting rid of unneeded files by putting them in the Trash.

Again: I'm not complaining that Time Machine files need different treatment. I'm complaining that Apple was unable to develop an alert that would either prevent me from doing something that just required me to delete the backups of an older machine that I actually wanted to keep, or at least give me an alert that my action was not recommended.

Instead, my Finder happily moved the Time Machine files to the Trash, and when I selected Empty Trash, it happily got to work, saying it was "deleting files".... except that it wasn't. The problem here is not Time Machine.

And the lovely snippet you copied, which I've also read, of course, does not explain what to do when I spend my hard-earned cash with Apple to buy a new machine. I would actually like an old backup, but don't need the hourly/daily/weekly for the past 5 years any more. Thus it seemed perfectly reasonable to get rid of a lot of snapshots... and the Finder let me do it (or at least, performed the illusion of allowing me).

Read my post: I'm only asserting that an alert would be appropriate, not that what I did has to work!

And yet Apple can't program an alert when I follow the standard GUI in dragging folders to the trash. Astonishing!

Thanks, much appreciated!