Well, the point is that after the 2000's some new hard disk like devices (including USB sticks and SSD's) have been available and became common in use, making m

Well, the point is that after the 2000's some new hard disk like devices (including USB sticks and SSD's) have been available and became common in use, making most if not all provisions that were "smart" for rotating media largely meaningless, and the size of rotating media increased so much that the "around the middle of the filesystem" has been a largely moving target. The "default" settings (including the placement of the $MFT on cluster 786432 or 0xC0000 if you prefer) is clearly something that made a lot of sense on a given size of volume, but having it "hardcoded" as default for any volume larger than around 5/6 GB makes not any real sense, hence I stand by my "queer". As seen in the given reference, it is possible (and relatively easy) to "move" the $MFT (and other NTFS filesystem structures) to an "earlier" address on the volume, and the NTFS (which as said has been very, very well designed) works and performs just fine. On the other hand, moving it near the actual "around middle" (on rotating disks) is far from being easy, even nowadays. What I was pointing out is that after all these years the "format" tool has not evolved allowing directly these kind of changes/offering the user the possibility to finer tune the file system.