I'very always wondered how you tease that apart from the native people simply not having the ability to combat naturally caused wildfires. When we suppress them, we employ a ton of technology (from chainsaws to C130s full of red dust) that weren't available back then.
I don't know if that was really a "decision" or an unfortunate compromise. DOS inherited /foo style command line parameters from CP/M, and DOS 1 didn't have a hierarchical file system, so there was no conflict with the path delimiter character UNIX was using. When DOS 2 introduced directories (and brought over the cd, md, rd, etc. commands from UNIX) suddenly we had to choose between massively breaking backwards compatibility or using something else, like \, as a delimiter.
As far as I recall, the original impetus behind what became PowerShell (as handed down to us in a conference room by Ballmer himself, sometime around 2001) was to fill the gap between ops people who did enterprise administration manually with tools like MMC and engineers who automated enterprise administration with tools like C++/DCOM. The latter were necessary in a lot of cases, but they were expensive, and we needed to give the industry a way to do powerful automation without hiring a bunch of PhDs. So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry.