I think this is not the worst situation. Downloading executable code is very rare in normal use cases and is extremely common and powerful for malware. For the common user, its better to just turn this off. And for the power user, they are free to sideload apps that can do whatever they want.
The problem is you can't actually turn it off like you think you should be able to do. As well, you should expect feature parity (automated updates and so on) with the R^X turned off.
