If not, what are the prevailing critiques and concerns of that design choice?
1 Answer
Like most of these internal choices in the Bitcoin system, it's not really explained by the author and can't be easily changed even if anybody had a strong objection to it. Internally all values are 64 bit integers, and just displayed to the user as value / 1e8.
The original wxBitcoin releases displayed two decimal places of precision.
