You use maya or C4D, and the tools are obvious. Hit move and you just drag an arrow, hit scale and you just scale it on the axis you chose, grabe rotate and just rotate it along the correct ring.
That’s the only thing that really doesn’t make sense to me. It’s weird.
What you’re expressing is a common complaint for Zbrush noobs, and its a complaint I, too, held until I got used to the transpose line. The short answer to your question if there’s a reason is that Pixologic doesn’t like to do things the way they’ve already been done. Its exactly that “out of the box” thinking that makes Zbrush brilliantly like nothing else out there, but can sometimes lead to some less than intuitive UI elements. Beyond that, however, the transpose line, once you grow accustomed to how it works offers a lot more functionality that a straight forward transform widget. However, it would appear you’re not running the latest version of Zbrush (4R8), because the app now offers (even defaults to), a more traditional transform widget. Remember, Pixologic makes their updates free, so there’s no good reason not to run the latest.