My brain has already rewired to the fleksy keyboard gestures.

http://www.fleksy.com/

This is great, holding down the backspace key on iOS literally never works out it always speeds up just at the point you want to stop at and deletes a bunch of words.

I know 3D touch select exists but that's just another vector of fiddlyness and not always worth the effort.

Not interested in 3rd party keyboards either, actually shocked apple shipped that seen as it was clearly a feature people stamped their feet about and then when it existed forgot about it in 2 months.

WRIO Keyboard does have similar and way more features...

Clever idea. Could this be implemented as a custom keyboard?

As a side-note, why is it not possible on iOS to shift-backspace to forward-delete text? Seems pretty logical to me, though I suppose Apple have other ideas.

Definitely less fiddly then text selection, but seems like it runs into similar problems over three lines - do you just hold it at the top of the keyboard as it speed-selects line after line? Nonetheless an improvement!

vertical selection would lead to chaos in varying blocks of text. easier and more precise to just select the text directly and delete it.