I doubt they cared about setting 3.1 roms or a1200's, they wouldn't have received any money from that. However they would have had to double the amount of testing they did.
3.1 is necessary, quite why they blocked PCMCIA the way they did is a mystery. It should have been possible to only reject cards that couldn't be mapped (which IIRC should only have been ram cards).
Also, it set the minimum hardware requirements for 3.5 and 3.9, meaning that you could be sure that an Amiga with 3.5 or 3.9 had 3.1 ROMs. It shouldn't make a difference really if they're softkicked, but it was a decent way of making sure everyone was as up-to-date as possible. Hardly dishonest! Can you be 100% sure though that everything works as expected? For example, 3.1 will boot to Workbench with 3.0 ROMs but some programs will crash that don't if it's 3.0 / 3.0 or 3.1 / 3.1...
I wonder also if there were weird side-effects caused by some accelerators which mightn't be immediately obvious, and which caused issues with PCMCIA in rare cases? Or, maybe it was feared that some PCMCIA driver software would assume the PCMCIA addresses were free for it to use, which would be a dangerous situation if it was actually system RAM...
