Believe me when I say that it's something that's annoyed me about XBMC for years, long before I was a member of Team XBMC. However, it's not an easy fix with the way XBMC works. Making something that looks easy is often the most challenging.
Not only does a solution need to be coded, but it needs to be worked into the GUI in a logical manner. You also need a developer that wants to work on it and that has time. Just about all of our developers have their own long lists of things they want to do, and they only have so much time to spare on XBMC. Every day it seems like someone is demanding that their feature/issue be put to the front of everyone else's list. It just doesn't work that way.
The Team is also looking to revamp the settings UI so that things are easier and more intuitive. No matter how simple or "must have" the feature is, we can't blindly dump it on an existing crowded settings UI. Nor is this the only thing waiting to be added to the settings. Making a good GUI that looks simple is really hard. It's easy to say "but that's so simple" in hindsight, but someone had to come up with that "simple" solution in the first place.
This is not something that's been excluded because we didn't think about it or because we don't want to do it.
XBMC is open source, so anyone can give it a go, and if they come up with something good then we'll incorporate it for everyone. So far that really hasn't happened. The closest thing we have is
Add-on:Missing Movie Scanner (wiki), and according to the
thread for it, they're working out various issues still.
The source code is out there, so anyone who thinks that this must be done and is easy is more than welcome to give it a go. Learn a little bit about programming (you don't even have to be able to do it, just know what's involved), see the issues we face, and then try to come up with a solution that actually works and is usable by hundreds of thousands of users.