One of the founding fathers? Try, "the majority of the Constitutional Convention." Had it been otherwise, the Bill of Rights would have been in the body of the text rather than in amendments to it.I shudder to think of what this nation would be like without them.
What is "obvious" changes over time.
A SCOTUS justice will talk a good fight about recognizing that the framers considered that the Bill of Rights was redundant - that the body of the text is to be interpreted as implying everything that the Bill of Rights states explicitly - and more.The objection to a Bill of Rights was that it would be interpreted as limiting the rights of the people to only those things explicitly mentioned. Hence, the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.It can therefore be argued that whenever an appeal is made to the Bill of Rights it is a shortcut, and that the proper jurisprudence of the Constitution should not even require reference to the Bill of Rights, which should properly be labelled a Bill of Some of the Rights of the People and the States.The question (the historical counterfactual) is, whether the rights of the people and of the states would have been as much respected without the "Bill of Rights" there as essentially a list of things which are not in the Constitution? The example of Jefferson buying Louisiana without specific constitutional warrant does not make us sanguine about that . . .
I would have to agree with you. The Bill of Rights do tend to point to only ten rights, and are widely misinterpreted by the general public.