I think in the very early Blender versions it was very inflexible, you couldn’t have an empty face and it was hard to work with. I think they later did a bunch of coding to have that flexibility and called the feature Bmesh, or something like that. So it’s actually a blessing to have that functionality, that you can slowly build up to a full face, have a lone vertex, then two vertices floating separately, then you can connect them both with an edge, then have four vertices and four edges and no face to fill them and then if you want you can fill it all with a face. There was a time that flexibility was impossible and when it happen it made it all better.
