Hi!
Because I believe that these areas have been neglected for too long without proper reason, and I want to rattle everyone's cage about that.
You listed quite a lot of proper reasons. The issue you're describing probably didn't seem to be that important to overall project execution to those, who did the development.
The things I listed are rather basic things that shouldn't be broken, IMHO, in such a generally important software in its seventh year of development.
Unfortunately, 'generally important' is getting major development for 'narrow use' of it.
The counting of category members has been discussed quite a few times though. It probably has to be done for quite a few other reasons.
BR,