One of the few rationales I can summon is that when you look at driving and travel as a whole, the total time/mileage that falls in the distribution of long distance may be significantly lower than that of the total time/miles spent in the more difficult inner city driving situations. Moreover, since we're looking at businesses not trying to do humanity a favor but pursing a profit motive, the driving spent in inner city travel is deemed more profitable than the longer haul travel, likely because you have to compete with rail systems, air transit, and so forth. That's all guesswork though, curious if data exists on this.
I'm the same way. Sure, I'll take full self-driving if it's on offer. But TBH, if you can handle the 2-4 hour parts of a typical weekend drive to the mountains, that's a big win for me. Ditto for handling most of the 70 minute or so drive to the nearest major city.
It's not as exciting and doesn't open up the shared vehicle use cases and so forth. But full autonomy under most conditions on limited access highways still seems like a great feature a lot of people would love to pay for. But the driving around my neighborhood and environs actually isn't something I generally find to be a particular burden,
Maybe iteration 1 of all this should be detectors that help drivers do better:
1. Unsafe driving speed alarms (given conditions)
2. Notification of areas that are historically unsafe
3. Baby in the back-seat!
4. Alcohol in the driver's seat detection (even if you don't have an existing DUI/setup)
Any 1 of those implemented en-masse would likely reduce accidents/deaths world more than Full self driving AI (in its current form), and if that was truly the goal, I don't understand why these aren't the top little buggers to fix and release in 2021.