On one hand it's backwards from the user experience POV. On the other hand it garantees consistency and resolves most of the weird edge cases of contacts syncing.

I think the common wisdom would be to put the burden on the engineers to find a solution that somewhat handles all the quircks. Personally I've had so many sync failure and weird behaviors from all the services tried until now that I would settle for a more reliable system, even it had severe usability limitations.

I envy organizations that can omit "obvious" features when they don't have a good enough solution to satisfy all the edge cases.