You are absolutely right. It is a good feature, but it must be a concious decision. It should not be default. You should set it in your shell alias or environment, just like you have something like

  LESS="-FQMR"

(no bell, more status, raw characters, exit if less than one page).

Those are also completely reasonable to use, but they must set conciously, otherwise the might give results that confuse the user.