Company I worked with 25 years ago had new 737-200's with -17 engines. Runway lengths at some of the Pacific island atolls varied from 4800 ft to 9000 ft. The Boeing performance engineer who designed our runway analyses suggested that we use one flap setting for take off instead of several that were available. He suggested flap 10. With improved climb we could get an additional 2500 kgs which meant that we could get off at 53,000kgs bleeds off, which was max structural.
V-speeds were increased around 15 knots at the time. It also meant that we could use lower Vspeeds when light weight, as Flap 10 was OK for really short runways.
My view was that it gave more flexibility to the pilot to have a whole range of available flap settings for take off ie Flap 1 right through to Flap 25. But the chief pilot of the day decided to stick with flap 10 and improved climb for all take offs.