I think it's because the implication of any such question is how/why did they exclude.... It's like when you ask somebody, did you have a nice day? If they respond "yes" or "no", that's breaking the unstated rules of conversation.

And I would add that perceived competence does not preclude elementary solutions or problems. We're all humans, and humans are entirely prone to silliness, regardless of our credentials. NASA lost a near billion dollar Mars orbiter [1] because nobody, of the thousands of highly credentialed people that worked on that project, bothered to ask, 'Did anybody make sure that all components are using the same measurement system (metric vs customary), run a sim, or at least sanity check the data we're getting back?' Because surprisingly, the answer there would have been "no."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter