There is no reason they make the transfer speeds as hard to read/decipher as possible. However there is a reason that features are separated. These do cost money in implementation in regards to the cable, the host, and client.
But we make the up front cost trade-off at the expense of nothing working right. People buy cables or chargers that don't support the right level of charging. Cables work with some monitors but not others. Instead of paying extra for things that just work, we end up paying for impossible-to-distinguish hardware that may or may not work because of some flavor of the spec that doesn't work with the other piece of hardware you're trying to connect it to. A lot of that ends up being instant trash. Genuine, good hardware that is just incompatible is indistinguishable from badly made hardware: to the consumer they both don't work. And so we end up with waste and frustration in the name of saving a few bucks.
The charging situation isn't their fault. USB wasn't designed for it. Non-compliant devices started allowing charging before it was ever permitted. Then they added PD but nobody supported it and manufacturers cooked up their own ad hoc systems to detect a charger.
> The charging situation isn't their fault. USB wasn't designed for it. Non-compliant devices started allowing charging before it was ever permitted.
A standards body at least shares some fault when they move so slowly that real solutions have to work ahead of them to provide a demanded feature and things end up in a mess like this.
PD predates USB 3. Nobody supported it until it became integrated into modern USB controllers. Prior to that there were janky manufacturer specific resistor combinations used to signal the presence of a charger.
