Has nothing to do with "old mentalities."
It is the geek in me that recognizes that locations are bad UI and hates using them. Most people I see lauding them don't have a clue how they are calculated, and they attribute things to them that they do not do, as if highlights and such rely on locations for precision.
Aside from the numbers that require too much calculation and the crazy "1357-64" display of range, the worst is related to the fact that no one can predict or figure how many locations they are looking at. You can have one full screen of text that holds 50 locations, and the next full screen holds 10 locations.
All of that is flat-out bad UI, so no one should be surprised at the negative reception.
They also can't be standardized, and have no future as the disparity would only get worse as ebooks became more sophisticated.