chuckebaby
In my opinion, It's like leaving the lights on in your car. you turned them on, so why don't you turn them off when your done driving ?
Indeed, there is not a single new automobile that one can purchase that will not give the driver an audible alert it the headlights have not been switched off if they attempt to exit the cockpit without doing so.
I can tell you that given the choice between flying in a jetliner designed so that the pilot had to remember which position they left the buttons in vs. one with indicator lights on the buttons, I will choose not to ride in the one where they devoted more engineering resources to the "more important" matters. :-)
Seriously, from a systems analysis viewpoint, I look at the likelihood of the user being distracted by intermediate tasks (such as mixing, editing, driving, unloading groceries, answering txt messages, whatever) and the consequences of the control being left in the wrong position (car battery being drained, hundreds of editing decisions being lost).
It seems like something with dire consequences if forgotten. There can be so many distractions in my studio, a project with 20 or more tracks, each track with multiple takes, effects, automation. It's just one less thing to have to worry about or keep track of. One can just glance up at the control bar to check if it's on or off, like Snap.
And while I really do hate to armchair program, my guess is that making some pixels change color depending on the state of a function somewhere in the program is not very expensive in terms of development resources.