You're overthinking it. It's because most people are mathematically illiterate and most people don't know that there's even a difference between median and ave

You're overthinking it. It's because most people are mathematically illiterate and most people don't know that there's even a difference between median and average or a reason to use one over the other. Computationally, computing the average vs the median is virtually instant for 99+% of data sets on modern hardware. I can't imagine what a data set would have to look like for it to take an extra 10 minutes to figure out the median.