Another interesting thing is that Discussion Settings is the part of WP with the most options available. Not sure if any decision was taken there :)

So probably many settings like pingbacks, trackbacks, settings for avatars could be completely removed and kept all these functionalities just for plugins.
Just make a comment section simple and clean but easily extensible with plugins.
Not logical to me to have more options for comments than for anything else.
WPTavern is a good example, even with so many options on Discussion settings, the site uses plugin for comments.