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The cent sign didn't make it into ASCII because no one ever made a serious proposal to include it, not through conscious exclusion.

ASCII-1963 did not have Backspace and therefore did not have character composition. The concept of composing accents appeared in ASCII-1965, by which time ¢ was already gone.

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Then I'm mixing up my 1960s technology. PLATO supported character composition, and APL used it for operators like ⍋ (∆, backspace, ∣), so I assumed that composition using backspace was a reasonably widely understood concept which would have affected ASCII.

I don't know why they were slow to embrace backspace. Maybe just because most of the control character that did make it in came from Teletype's requirements, but the Model 33 couldn't backspace so they didn't ask for that one.

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