If you've ever used a Nest thermostat before, you'd understand why a square display would be stupider.
It would either:
1. force a larger interface so the square display could have its diagonal fully enclosed by the diameter of the radial control (i.e., oafishly large thermostat too big for a human hand to easily manipulate)
2. force a smaller LCD to fit inside a normal hand-sized radial control, making it less readable to all but the spriteliest of youths
3. make a radial control that is a spinning rhombus, which is pretty ugly
Or we could just do what the Nest does and the only person who "suffers" is the original designer, one time, when they write the code