echo, default behaviour

everyone,

I had a question - why did you choose to make '-e' turn ON interpolation of backslashed
characters, rather than have a character to turn them OFF?

This behaviour flies in the face of every single echo implementation out there. Its a 
royal pain to have to check to see if the echo that I'm in fact using is gnu's and
make a determination of its behaviour based on whether it IS or IS NOT.

And could you change this, if possible?

Thanks much,

Ed