Ruin Explorer
Legend
I agree. So the question is, why didn't they do that? Loads of other Martials and even loads of Ranger subclasses have abilities to do a small amount of extra damage like that without it being a spell. If anything, it's the norm.The amount of work to convert it from spell to mundane class feature would be astonishingly small.
So why did they make Rangers have to spam a weird concentration-free, always-known (but not always active!) version of a spell? It doesn't fit the theme. It's not tradition. It's just weird.
My feeling is it's essentially "trolling" from WotC to see how people react. If there's no pushback they're likely to keep going with this sort of "let's make non-magical stuff into spells".