[nnnnnnnn]

Because, as the author points out, different users may want different globbing behavior. Globbing is not performed identically between shells.

If the author so wished, he might trivially create his own shell and allow * to match dotfiles, with absolutely no disruption to the rest of his system. Or one could write a shell which uses a regex instead of a glob. Or the SQL LIKE query syntax. The possibilities are endless. Anyone is free to do this.

The fact is, the current globbing behavior in unix shells strikes a good balance between pedantic correctness and "what I really want." The author's frustration is due to his attempting to use a command line interface as a structured programming language.