advance notice and control
which came first the chicken or the egg? aircraft or ATC?
i'm confident that if you had the aircraft strapped to your arse and were flying 4 sectors a day 5 days on and 3 off and flying maximum hours to so many airports that you would take the extra step to ask if a certain runway was available. especially when you hear that the ATIS is over two hours old, and perhaps on the 5th day, you would rather take the ILS rather than any non precision approach.
in the aircraft you are required to brief precisely what you will be doing and rather than brief two full approaches, you would rather make a call and confirm which runway/approach is available.
and when it comes down to it-you as a flight crew would have every right to ask for any certain runway you prefer. ATC will either deny or grant the request. but to say that the flight crew's request is annoying is forgetting that the aircraft came before ATC.