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Possible reasons include an unwarranted obsession with keeping the chainstays short, forcing a steep seat tube angle, and allowing for you to move forward in the future. If you start with a straight seat post, you can only really go back from there with various amounts of layback, whereas if you start with a medium layback post you have a fair amount of wiggle room. I don't object to posts which have a bit of lay back per se, I just think the Thomson version is staggeringly ugly.

Had a chat with robin today.

His view is that the straight inline seatpost is a product of mountain biking, brought into road bikes via tt bikes.

Traditional road seatposts were all set back - clamp offset from the post itself.

The thomson clamp is actually in line with the post itself but the post is then bent to give it layback.

So effectively the thomson is a kinky inline post that ends up giving a similar position to a traditional straight post where the clamp is offset.