Comment by president_zippy

By that logic, there was no value added in updating the syntax from ANSI C to C99: no reason to add double-slash comments, no reason to allow function-local variables to be declared and initialized where you use them instead of the top of the function, and no reason to omit a return statement for the main() function.

From your reasoning, it also follows that using infix notation instead of Polish notation for arithmetic does absolutely nothing to lower the learning curve.