[In bygone days, when mail took a week to cross the continent,] I as
a node admin did what I could to prevent our system from being part
of the precipitate, and did have an expectation that others would do
likewise - but I also knew enough about ways we could silently lose
mail that I accepted unreliability as just a fact of email life.
If you're talking about hardware faults, unreliability is just a fact
of life, tout court. At least, SMTP specifications allowed to tell
whose fault it was.
The SMTP specifications were irrelevant. This was the UUCP age.
In exchange for what are we giving up reliability now?
Usability.
Why would email be less usable if it implied some sort of
responsibility on the sender's side?
I'm not sure what you mean here.
When you ask "[i]n exchange for what are we giving up reliability
now?", I read this as "in the transition currently underway, involving
a decrease in reliability, what benefit are we getting in exchange?".
I don't see any way that sender responsibility is relevant to that
question; my answer is simply "preservation of usability", or, perhaps
more accurately, "taking a small usability loss rather than a
disastrous one".
The transition in which we gave up sender responsibility is long past,
was quite protracted (roughly, I'd say, Sep 1993 through Oct 1998), and
was largely unrecognized at the time (and thus the question of benefits
gained in return did not arise).
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