I get it, but I don't agree that the defense is having a smaller number of tldns. I think the problem is with an omnibar in the first place, because it has to heuristically guess what you want. I preferred having a separate search bar from address bar.
For a technical professional, I fight with the behavior of my web browser's address bar far more often than I really think I should. Maybe the average person would be far better served if the browser only assumed you meant a URL if you explicitly included a scheme, and otherwise just did a search.