CONF iture:
The provocative answer to that question would be: "because Airbuses were designed by engineers but unfortunately flown by pilots"...
My personal guess is that they wanted to brake with the "old" concepts. Starting with a blank sheet, they wanted to show the world that they were able to design an all new aircraft reflecting the European potential for innovation. "An aircraft made against pilot's errors"...
I had the opportunity to meet Pierre Baud, when I was invited to Toulouse in the early ninety's, to fly one of their A330 testbed aircraft. That was my first experience with a FBW aircraft (before that, only Boeing and A310's) and I personally had the chance to verbalize my worries in this regard (no feed-back on SS, added inputs on SS, lack of need for trimming, ATS in step of Auto-Throttles) and he explained to me that this was a new concept of aircraft and that the FBW represented not only an evolution on the handling characteristics but also the chance to save on weight and that the final goal would be MFF and communality.
I do understand that at certain point of the design work, AI engineers had to take options. They have opted for this system and there is no go-back, at this time. It is not yet clear for the majority of the pilot's community that the system is wrong. There's a great deal of pilots feeling quite comfortable flying SS without feed-back, but as Donald A. Norman wrote on his:
THE PROBLEM OF AUTOMATION:
INAPPROPRIATE FEEDBACK AND
INTERACTION, NOT OVER-AUTOMATION
Donald A. Norman
University of California, San Diego
As automation increasingly takes its place in industry, especially high-risk
industry, it is often blamed for causing harm and increasing the chance of human
error when failures occur. I propose that the problem is not the presence of
automation, but rather its inappropriate design. The problem is that the
operations under normal operating conditions are performed appropriately, but
there is inadequate feed back and interaction with the humans who must control
the overall conduct of the task. When the situations exceed the capabilities of the
automatic equipment, then the inadequate feedback leads to difficulties for the
human controllers.
The problem, I suggest, is that the automation is at an intermediate level of
intelligence, powerful enough to take over control that used to be done by people,
but not powerful enough to handle all abnormalities. Moreover, its level of
intelligence is insufficient to provide the continual, appropriate feedback that
occurs naturally among human operators. This is the source of the current
difficulties. To solve this problem, the automation should either be made less
intelligent or more so, but the current level is quite inappropriate.