I think they do things this way so that programs that need to install cron jobs can just copy a script into the appropriate directory.
In particular, many .rpm packages include files that
go in these directories. Apparently, rpm does not
support the possibility that a package might contain
individual lines that go into certain files, probably
because it would not then be obvious, after other
packages had been installed that put lines in there
as well, which lines belonged to which packages,
which would create a mess when uninstalling or
upgrading packages. For this reason, many people
have altogether quit using the old /var/spool
crontabs anymore; everything goes into the
hourly, daily, weekly, or
monthly directories, unless it is set up by hand by
an unprivileged user. On the desktop, unprivileged
users don't usually set up cron jobs by hand, since
almost everyone these days has a computer of their
own and thus has root access when need be. The
user crontabs are still useful for multiuser systems,
especially shared servers where various people have
shell accounts. I suppose they might get used on
shared lab computers too, and that sort of thing,
where most of the users cannot get root access to
install anything in the global cron directories.
(These are the same sorts of systems where people
cannot install modules off of CPAN except in their
home directories, and other horrid nonsense.)
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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