Data-

I've been pounding this drum myself for awhile now, but I don't mind another post on the issue.

To answer your question: there is no reason why this has not been implemented, or why it wasn't done from the start. The only thing SE has said about it is that it has been "considered" in response to player concerns, but was assigned a lower priority behind the server queue issues.

This was just a boneheaded decision made by the dev team, and they are unwilling to publicly admit they made a mistake.