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The Kindle OS simply can't handle having 15 or 20,000 titles it right now. It would slow down to an unusable crawl.
Therefore I don't see the great benefit in adding an SD card slot at this time. Would it be beneficial for the relatively small percent of users who have a lot of very large files? Sure. But that's not most people, and manufacturers look to please the majority, not the small percent.
It's also easy for us here, friends of Alf, Calibre users, power readers and users overall, to forget that not everybody is like us. Both my parents have Kindles. They still haven't mastered library books, which can be handled wirelessly for the most part, much less sideloading (despite writing out painstaking step by step instructions). For people like them, and I think there are a lot of them because voracious readers skew older as a group than most tech users, there is real value to simplicity and not being confronted by menu after menu of configuration options. Would I like a few more options? Sure, but none of it is a dealbreaker to me.
I also don't think Amazon can fairly be accused of the strict walled garden approach, when they have allowed sideloading since day one, and support sending personal documents (including DRM free books purchased elsewhere) to be uploaded to the cloud and then downloaded to any Kindle device. A true walled garden would not allow that.
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