I think it's easy to misinterpret any of the "Unix philosophies". It's Ye Olde "MIT vs New Jersey" again, and Unix is relentlessly straight out of NJ. Simplicity in the "NJ" sense isn't what you'd expect if you're of the "MIT" mindset.
That's a good point. Makes me think again of "slow devices" and interrupts leading to EINTR or partial reads/writes. In my eyes a beautifully pragmatic solution to a real world problem, and yet at some point SA_RESTART was devised.
