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I don't see very many posters who come both here and over there (not trying to start a flame war understand  ), so I guess its just community standards at work.
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Honestly, the appeal of the two games is different. I enjoy both, but nuclear power puts a very different spin on the nature of how the game is played.
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I like starting farther away from the enemy in a blue water scenario because then the convergence zones come into play-what's the point of placing the enemy inside the last CZ like I see in so many scenarios?
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In environments where you lack significant depth excess, you might not see any convergence zones.
Ignoring that possiblity, I think the point is that putting the enemy in close tends to have the effect of shortening the amount of time you have for decision making, and ultimately the amount of time from detection to shooting. I think in certain other cases, the scenario designer is trying to surprise the player. For those who want to play "ASW Doom" that's great. Although I think it's sort of a cheap trick, ultimately, because once you realize there's a submarine placed in close, you don't get fooled a second time so the scenario gets old fast.
Having to surprise the player by artificially putting an enemy in close is a sign of having insufficient randomness in the scenario. When designing scenarios I think it's really important to randomize the enemy submarine's location and depth. It doesn't hurt to randomize the number of submarines as well. It's also important to choose an appropriate distance scale for the scenario to occur over. If you do all of those things, then there's enough uncertainty in the game for the enemy to surprise you without resorting to cheap tricks which wear off once you've discovered them. It makes for more replayable scenarios and it makes for much more fun ones in my mind, because it makes the player the decision-maker. Isn't that why we fantasize about driving submarines in the first place, to be in the captain's chair? Too often scenario designers try to make people jump through too many hoops and if you don't solve a problem in a very specific way, then you lose. That's lame. Scenarios should be open ended enough that people can try different tactics, approaches and methodologies and still win. It should be up to the player what the best way to tackle a problem is.
The other thing I see going on sometimes is just people not knowing. Sometimes people honestly
try to add enough randomess and they just don't know enough about ASW tactics and search theory to make decisions about things like how to position and size random position boxes or dynamic locations so that the randomness they add actually matters and doesn't just suck up CPU cycles.