Historically wasn't the original design to send to the public key as the destination - there was no hash in the original design?
Then, in order to save space, the whole hashing to a public address was added on top?
That was my understanding - which is often flawed when it comes to esoteric history.
My understanding was that there's additional benefits to hashing the pubkey. For example, if a wallet implementation was flawed and used a bad 'k value'.