PowerShell returns objects, not strings. Which means they can have as much information as you like without being overly verbose :-)
How does the user know exactly which output he is going to get? The formatting program cannot know anything about default expected output - so it either must be specified explicitly, or objects must distinguish between default_for_formatter_to_output fields and more_verbose_hidden_fields - I'm really not a fan of the amount of man <command_name> using Unix involves, - but is the alternative really much better?
It works pretty well. In the end there is also some convention that helps it work more consistently.
In practice, it is kind of cool to be able to construct new objects as the pipeline progresses so that can customize that behavior. I've found that with some aliases for default commands it can be reasonably succinct as well.
So ls, by default, gives Mode,LastWriteTime,Length,and Name.
But if I check all of the properties I get PSPath, PSParentPath, PSChildName, PSDrive, PSProvider, PSIsContainer, BaseName, Mode, Name, Parent, Exists, Root, FullName, Extension, CreationTime, CreationTimeUtc, LastAccessTime, LastAccessTimeUtc, LastWriteTime, LastWriteTimeUtc, Attributes
Didn't realise it wouldn't line-break!