Unnecessarily stopping at a floor for a few seconds is minor to literally everyone riding in a public elevator.

But yeah, I'm sure that at all of the various elevator companies, over all of the years that elevators have had electronic controls, nobody has bothered to put any thought into this.

Limiting options is exactly the point. Elevators are supposed to be easy to use for the entire population, including the very young, the very old, those with disabilities, those not able to read or write the dominant language, etc.

In these cases, it is simply the best UX to keep everything really simple.

There's some incentive not to do that, however, because in many cases it will inconvenience you just as much as everyone else. But if you could just deselect all the floors between the current one and your destination, there's a pretty strong incentive there.

Until someone punches you out, of course, because it'd be hard to hide and you're in a confined space with them...

That doesn't prevent people from getting to their destination.

Elevators sometimes have an anti-mischief feature where they will deselect every floor if all the floors are selected in a brief period of time. The cab will slow to a stop if no new buttons are pressed. It’s kind of eerie, actually.

That's a one way ratchet. Once selected, the fight is over.

If you can go back and forth, it would probably get violent.

It isn’t an argument. It’s a statement of fact.