It was probably cost.
Some of the old sets were actually done from photos, like the halftone portions of T206 or many of the caramel cards. But the color portion was what was done by artists.
Even on the most basic level, you'd need a plate for each color, six or more. Plus the back. And you'd have to pay the artists who did the backgrounds. That's already at least 6 times the cost.
The issuer would have had a lot of the say in it, and there's a pretty big difference between what a near monopoly is willing to pay to finish off any small competitors, and what a smaller company is willing to pay for something to give away for nothing to help stimulate sales.
There are a lot of similar modern situations, Topps going to large format cards in 52, which had to have been more expensive to produce than the smaller Bowmans.
And I think, even closer is the number of issues from MSA in the 70's. Mostly stock discs with black and white pictures that didn't include logos. Sometimes I think that many of the 20's sets were produced by a similar company. MSA didn't make stuff to compete with Topps, but made stuff that could be sold to a number of companies as giveaways.
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