I guess some history could be helpful here. It’s worth noting that at the time conda was conceived:
- The PyPA had been around less than a year
- Wheels did not exist yet
We had been advised explicitly by Python core developers to “go our own way” with packaging, if existing Python tools did not support scipy/pydata community needs. So we did. 
As someone else noted, the “normalization” affected distribution names (i.e, the filename), not package names, per se. And the reason for that was in order to include more detailed platform descriptor data in the filename itself. And I’m sure that tradeoff was in order to make something somewhere else simpler, or whatever (my memory is a bit hazy here).
Would I make the same decision today, with the current (much better) state of python packaging tools? Definitely not. I alluded to that much above. If I could wave a wand, what I would wish for today is:
- conda-style environments (because a link farm is more general)
- wheel packages for most/all Python packages (because they are sufficient)
- “conda packages” (or something like them) for anything else, e.g. non-python requirements
But history is just history, and all projects have some. At some point things just become old decisions that are hard to undo (though it sounds like this specific one largely has been, by and large [1]).
These days I am just a conda user, I haven’t been personally involved in conda development for many years ↩︎