I don't think this is intentional. My experience with AWS is that they aim to constantly improve products and create hosted services that are cheaper than if you frankensteined the same thing yourself. They don't always succeed, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for how bad cloudwatch truly is, and just assume either they're blind to the pain because they know what not to do internally, or they're just really hamstrung in trying to modify that feature since so much relies on it.

Hopefully this isn't just stockholm syndrome speaking though...