It took a few moments for me to realize why this seems helpful to some people and pointless to others. It's because of clients and aliases. If (like me) you never have and never intend to use aliases to scan all the rooms around you, there's never any confusion about which direction you're scanning, and minimal spam from the long range afforded high level characters.

So, any of the proposed alterations would be useless to anyone who doesn't use a client's alias function, and quite useful to those who do. As near as I can tell, the policy in the past has been to leave this sort of thing alone unless it benefits both sides of the coin. For someone like me, the added 'EAST' in a scan is pointless and annoying. I don't see how it could help both the alias users and the non-alias users, and therefore see no reason why the Imms would want to bother with it.