Don't forget to tip your waitresses!

It's right down there on the stupidity scale with Ford's "Push inward on end of turn signal stalk to honk horn" crapola of the early '80s

Remember the rubber horn switch that ringed the inside of the steering wheel of several "upscale" Ford products back in the 70's or was it GM.

Nope. One had nothing to do with the other. The Edsel's electric pushbutton shift was long gone years before anyone had taken even the first hint of a notion to regulate auto controls and displays in North America. Chrysler dropped the pushbuttons (which even Ralphie Nader described as safer than a shift lever) because driving schools weren't buying Mopars due to their "not the same as GM and Ford" shifting setup, and Chrysler firmly believed that it was important to get Mopars into the country's driving schools to breed the next generation of Mopar buyers. I think that's kind of lame, but there it is. There are a lot of cracker barrel explanations for the end of the pushbutton trans. Fact is, not only were there no laws current or pending at the time, but there wasn't even a regulatory framework in which to make any such a law until 1968. The closest thing was that certain large-volume fleet buyers (government agencies, state motor pools, etc.) adopted a set of specs and requirements for the cars they would buy. Had to have reversing lights, had to have an automatic shift sequence that didn't place any reverse position right next to any forward drive position (the end of GM's dumb and unsafe P N D L R quadrant), had to have front and rear seatbelts, etc. In the absence of actual regulation, buying specs like this caused automakers to phase in what would now be considered (and was eventually codified as) improvements in safety equipment and performance. In North America, our vehicle equipment and safety regulations run very heavily towards simple codification of what the industry is already doing (i.e., what they want to do). This is still significantly true today, but it was very much more so in the 1960s. Whether codifying industry practice counts as meaningfully regulating auto safety (it doesn't) is a separate question.

Wellll...despite my comments above, it's just as good a location if your car is automatic (no preference either way) and it's significantly better if your car has a manual transmission (your left foot's already got enough to do). The signal stalk location also facilitates a "headlamp flash" function you can't have with a kickswitch. Also, with the column location you can use a less costly switch (built into the turn signal switch rather than a separate switch that also must be waterproof due to the floor location) and you've saved punching/drilling and waterproofing two floor holes, as well as removing one "gotta get it right" indexing location for the carpet and carpet padding. These kinds of things add up at the production level.

I don't object to the turn signal stalk beam selector as long as it's the kind you pull to change the beam (low to high or high to low). As I've already complained, the "push forward for high beam, pull back for low beam" types are dumb.

Just like it is not a problem to be on the cell phone and row through the gears for the younger generation...

The reasoning for moving of the dimmer switch was because you could not dim your lights and manipulate the clutch at the same time.