They were deliberate. I added support for a lot of DWARF2 way back in the dark ages of time, and hit most of these design choices. It was basically built to s

They were deliberate. I added support for a lot of DWARF2 way back in the dark ages of time, and hit most of these design choices. It was basically built to support STABS (or was it DBX, i always forget). Everything else was an afterthought. That doesn't make it the wrong choice mind you, and lots of things have been made better or redesigned in the past 2 decades. But to your point, it wasn't really meant for the use case of assembly debugging. In part because assembly debuggers already existed on most OSen. Also, because if you were using GDB, you were supposed to have both the source, and the debug info (because it was the FSF debugger)