I think it's rather a tradeoff. I mean, the founder was pretty much in favor of anonymity judging by his posts[1][2]. The reason the network doesn't operate in "complete anonymity", as in Monero, might be because he wasn't aware of how to implement it at that time, or because it'd be a burden in terms of transaction scaling. If you didn't know it, Monero full nodes need to keep all the outputs and be able to efficiently index them, whereas in Bitcoin, you only need to keep UTXOs.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9074#msg9074
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8.msg34#msg34