According to what has been said it doesn't seem to have been intentional, just intentionally kept. It's obvious this wouldn't be a feature as it is, without providing other management tools to compensate, since it makes trade impossible and raises deaths-while-journeying exponentially. Just crash the server and everything should be fine.
It's all fucked up and it's been bad for my village, but I'm genuinely interested in seeing what happens. For me this game is a big social experiment and fundamental parameter changes like these are gold. Science at its finest.