I think it is almost a inevitability where otel came as a standardised aggregate of OpenTracing (which was the same but only for tracing over multiple tracing implementations), logging, and metrics into a single observability standard without alienating all the individual supporting vendors.

Historically, logging and metrics have been different problem domains with different implementations for ages.

Now to your point: Note that tracing does get the most of love, and that it does include constructs to add logging and metrics into these traces (spans actually). So you could argue that they are trying to develop a single interface.

> “The next time something like this occurs again, please save me a trace.”

Well, if you want this you either need to propagate this predicate to all points that might be involved, or always emit all traces and have the predicate included in the filter. And then you need to be able to dynamically propagate this predicate from the system/ui where you click to where you filter.

This is one of the reasons why we always propagate and emit traces and just post filter it in processing before it lands in the persistence layer.