Well part of the (if not THE) reason for that was that they were extremely inefficient in the whole process (complete clones of the master repository including

Well part of the (if not THE) reason for that was that they were extremely inefficient in the whole process (complete clones of the master repository including the complete history, although you don't really need that as a cocoapods user). And it is still inefficient today, considering that an initial pod install takes around 12 minutes just to clone the cocapods repo...