Well that is quite easy to answer:
The Technics was not release as a simple consumer turntable but as a high fidelity product in a time where HiFi still meant something. Now many vinyls while having good sound did undergo some stress and hence the tempo of songs, especially on so called Maxi-Singles was not always spot on. Hence the pitch fader was actually not there for beatmatching, but to slightly alter the speed to make it closer to the original recording. However there was no internet back then so many times it was only done for feel! This comes to a second thing where HiFi always had its home: ballroom dancing was big back then. Everyone had to go to a dancing school and dance to big band tunes. If you may then the beginnings of DJing were dance instructors matching the beat to what they felt was correct for the dance. Hence they needed pitch faders to make the tempo of a cha cha song to that cha cha speed that the dancing schools agreed upon. Especially in Japan and China ballroom dancing was extremely big (and in some cases still is), so this was also something for the home market …
The direct drive high torque motor of the 1200s was also good to keep constant speed, so it was actually invented to hold tempo better and not for scratching…
Now when CD players came out the ground rules were already established. The home crowd did not use the pitch faders anyways and CDs did not underly ageing or stress, as the music was digital. Now even before CDJs came out you actually had several CD player companies make “professional CD players”, like Denon and Sony, that actually had a pitch rotary adjustment on the front of the otherwise standard consumer CD player with tray loading. Some had some upgraded metal parts and casings. Those were also marketed heavily to the ballroom dancing crowd, but in many cases the surviving big bands and ballroom dancing CD makers already tuned the pitch of their dance CDs to some dance and even labeled on the disk for what dance this was. So it was not widely used and disappeared from some product lines completely.
And now that I told you all this, everyone knows how old I must be hehe
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