Short answer: Nobody really gives a rat's ass.
Longer answer:
As @Volker points out, it doesn't make a big difference.
My question was specifically if this behavior is by design. (It's probably a bad question for SO, but oh well.) Was looking to see if this was something that was intentional, or just an oversight.
Java and other languages do it so I was trying to see if there was some "no we don't do that in Go because...". Doesn't seem to be the case. From what I can gather it just wasn't an important enough issue to spend time on putting in.
I asked about this here as well, and the reply was basically that yes, this is expected, sorry you don't like it, it ain't going to change. It's been added to go vet
and that should suffice. Which is fine - I agree.