Because I have these things called peripherals that I depend on, and would rather plug them in and have the machine make them work, than having to find bootleg generic drivers that dont really work, nor have to screw around with config files or a terminal in order to get them to sort of work.
Linus Mint 17.2 is particularly good about recognizing newly attached devices. Nice NOT to have to mess with config files.
That was true in the past, but what you describe and fear is 5-10 years out of date. 10 years ago Linux drivers were a frustrating disaster (bootleg generic drivers and all that -- I remember well!), and even 5 years ago it wasn't nearly up to Windows or OS X standards.
But these days Linux driver support for most (granted, not all) peripherals is pretty much on a par with Windows and OS X.
But to each their own, I always say. It'll take another 10 years for Linux to escape its past reputation of being hard or even impossible to configure. If you need an excuse reason to continue doing what you're doing, that's as good as any. :-)