[galaxyLogic]

I guess one reason is that it takes more code to return an Array when in most cases what the caller needs is always just a single value. Many such functions never return null so it is overhead to make them return an array.

But returning an array also makes your functions more general. Maybe in the future you want to modify it so that it does return arrays of length > 1. Evolving the program to that state is then easy if you didn't lock yourself into assumption that this function will never ever need to return more than a single value.