I suspect that was the main reason, but also combined with that is that it's probably tricky to figure out what counts as a legit view, and with the Steem blockchain in theory there could be multiple frontends so no individual frontend can have an authoritative sense of how viewed the underlying info is.

Maybe what they could do would be to use a relative scale of some sort in order to report views as a proportion of the overall views on the site, i.e. quartiles or quintiles or something like that. Then different sites could reasonably report different numbers, no matter how many dapps there are. That gets rid of the concern over low view counts, too.