[mwfunk]

You act like that's not intentional. If it's a feature that's there for legacy reasons only and it's used as little as possible by the system, and not one iota more, why the heck should Finder, et al expose it to users? In the (very, very, very) rare case that a user actually needs to get into the resource fork of some antiquated file, that user (who is going to be very technical by definition, otherwise how the heck would they even stumble across such a file or care about what's in it?) can simply use the very widely known and documented command line tools or APIs for dealing with it. Anything more than that and you'd just be encouraging people to use a feature that you don't want anyone to use in the first place.

There's a difference between having a feature you want everyone to use, vs. having a feature that only exists for very specific legacy reasons in very specific systems-level backwards-compatibility scenarios, that you don't want anyone to use under any circumstances. Exposing the feature more than it already is exposed would be far more confusing and hurtful to new computer users, most of whom don't understand working with filesystems in general much less specific low-level filesystem features like resource forks.