Something is occurring to me that may be [part of?] a reason that it works as it does. Suppose you are in the middle of typing in the content in a TEXT command, and for whatever reason you decide "never mind -- forget the whole thing." As it is now, you hit ESCape, and the whole thing is forgotten. If it worked as you want, you would presumably hit ESCape but your TEXT would be completed as it was up to that point, you would have added something to the drawing, and you would need to Undo to get rid of it. There would [I think] be no "forget the whole thing" option at all, unless they were to program in something like Shift+ESCape to do that.
In comparison to how LINE works [& PLINE], with ESCape leaving in place where you are so far: If TEXT worked as you describe, would the corollary in LINE be that when you hit ESCape, it finishes by drawing a final Line to your current cursor location before exiting? Is that "where you are" while drawing Lines, in an analagous way to "where you are" in typing Text content that you would want left there?
There is something different about the nature of picking points in a LINE command, each of which actually completes something, from the nature of typing the individual characters in TEXT content, none of which does, at least not in the same way. So it's at least arguable that the way ESCape operates is justifiably different between the two. But at least it might be nice if they could make it an option to choose which way you want it to work in TEXT.
Kent Cooper, AIA