Good points. I'm using KiCad 5.01, and am becoming quite familiar with that "edit spice parameters" menu. Noted about the history of the pin number re-ordering feature - while I used KiCad v4.x in the past, my first attempts at using the KiCad ==> SPICE capabilities have been with v5.x. I really like the link-up between the tools, despite a few quirks and rough edges here and there. It's a pretty powerful match-up.
There still is a small PSPICE library, where I grabbed a generic op-amp for my last project. From comments I've read, the PSPICE library used to be more populated that now. The op-amp also needed the pin-number reordering feature.
By the way, thinking about my comment above a little further, one could make the argument that SPICE and the JEDEC standards didn't actually NUMBER diodes and transistors. Take SPICE, the anode and cathode don't actually have the concept of a pin-1 and pin-2, rather, it's just the order of parameters to the DIODE model where anode comes first. Similarly, JEDEC didn't say anything about pin-1 for diodes or transistors - it just gives them letter names, not numbers. In the vein, you could say that IPC didn't buck the trend, rather they just assigned numbers to the pins that had never had numbers assigned in the first place.