Thank you for your capitalized input.
I dared not think they did it intently...
You call it "Design choice!!" This makes really things look much worse than I expected: with a bug you can hope for a quick solution, but if you are facing a "design choice", it means you will probably be stuck with it for quite a long time...
Will "shoddy implementation", or "design shortcoming" be acceptable to you? Because to qualify this as a "Design choice" seems to me a little overvalued for what we get from Kobo on this particular topic.