> To me, it's really stupid that anything but a tourist/business visit visa should be non-immigrant; all long-term stay visas should provide an easy path to permanent residence (sure, assuming whatever reasonable qualifications are met).

Americans don’t want that. A lot of our immigration-related problems is that the executive branch created a de facto permanent immigration system (with modest Congressional acquiesce in the 1990s) out of what was sold to the public as a temporary worker visa.