Let's consider it; why do you think the general audience will search for Sun Tzu and not Tzu, Sun? A system that just gives an unsearchable list of names and doesn't have Tzu, Sun, even if only as an alias, is unusable, correct or not.
I assure you that I and about a million other people have for our primary reading machines a machine which only provides a library of books sorted and listed by authorlastname and which does not in fact have a "search" capability on authornamepart and while I agree with you that I would prefer a machine with a stronger search capability the reason that we put up with this machine is that it is so many light years ahead of other machines that we might want to read on as to make that decision a "no brainer" -- even given the shortcomings of the user shell design. In fact after "putting up with" computers and having to print out documents for the last 35 years of my life I now find that I almost never print out anything, and I almost never buy a book or magazine in print anymore. And the machine goes with me everywhere and I read it every night in bed until I fall asleep. So this is by far my most useful most favorite machine I have ever had in my life. But then again, I do a LOT of reading! A better counter question is why would PG WANT to implement a system that prevents easy and correct implementation of common e-book formats? -- EPUB and MOBI ?