I am wondering if mining pools were originally thought about when Satoshi originally designed Bitcoin,
No.
and if they are in fact a desirable thing to have as part of the network.
Pooling for payment? The network doesn't care, thats a matter which only impacts the miners in question. But the common way that miners are implemented using "stratum" is actively harmful to the network and the security model of the Bitcoin system.
mining pools are 'encouraged' because you can have a pool where no particular miner has the information to generate the block and collect the block reward themselves.
You have completely misunderstood the pooled mining process and how its security arises. No secrecy is required or would be in any way helpful. Pooling is secure because miners send failed lower difficulty attemps ('shares') that prove that they were attempting to mine blocks meeting particular criteria. This proves their work in an unforgable way and protects the pool from the miner. (But nothing protects the miners from the pool with centeralized pools, and pools have "lost" the miners funds many times in the past)
It's just an accident of history that hardware operators commonly completely give up control over their vote, blindly selling their computation to a third party... secure mining is perfectly possible while leaving the operators in control of their vote, just by agreeing to pay the earnings according to the pool's policy. (As is implemented in P2pool, but could also be equally accomplished for centeralized pooling systems too)
If with some other hashing mechanism it was enforced that the miners had all the information they needed to generate the block themselves, it would discourage pools because any pool member could 'steal' a block.
Incorrect. A block cannot be 'stolen' because it is immutable once authored. Every attempted block has an independant success probablity, and changing any part of the block results in a totally different block.