Maybe there is a good reason. I'd just like to know what it is. My guess is that fixing issue 358 with syntactic sugar would mean that the debug info would show scope blocks that don't correspond to {} in the source, and that is annoying.
I also see that this is a bike-shed issue [1]. It probably isn't as important as some other language issues that are complicated enough that I don't even know about them. However, people's first impression of the language matter, so fixing the bike shed matters.