Well APIPA is sane to people for whom "networking" stands for either being on Social Networking sites or playing games on two or more computers "together"

MS people implemented APIPA so that people can just connect two machines without having to know what an IP is and how to configure it. You just need to know which cable goes where!

It's not a good idea for a server-client environment and in noway should be a substitute for DHCP. I never saw anything like that in UNIX/Linux world and would never like to see it. Everything has its own place.