It is not just analog designers but digital. In their world everything is synchronous. Async logic is feared due to race conditions (timing errors) and heavily discouraged. Also, memory to buffer data in async operation used to cost money. And complexity.But, one wonders, by hindsight, why the elegantly simple asynchronous USB or some similar technology took so long to come to fruition. I think the problem was that the audio industry was long dominated by analog-oriented engineers, and that they had to feel their way for quite some time by trial and error in the new world of digital audio. That is far less true today.
It is only recently that we are liberated from traditional consumer electronics engineers mandating design/specs. A computer guy naturally thinks of asynchronous operations. With cheap memory and microprocessors, everything becomes software.