The Core is actually designed to go into a closet/rack/server room, so installing X and Firefox on it didn't fit in the design decisions back then.
It is assumed that you have all connection parameters (gateway included) set up, that's why Network_Setup.sh does that.
In .33, The timeout was reduced to 10 seconds for apt, so it should be a little less. Still working on/thinking about a large scale internet check integration so if you don't have a internet connection, the net related ops don't execute.
We use vim, not nano

so vim is installed there and nano is just a fallback editor for early stage install problems when vim is not available (since I can't stand vi).