The badge page doesn’t matter indeed, it could be nice to see the badges. However, you can also see the members, which also includes the badges for the trust levels (which is a user directory) and others. This provides insight into user activity for guest users. I don’t like that. It’s a great feature to get to know fellow users, but it’s no one else’s business to get insight on the forum profiling. I consider that private information on user activity.
If it would work the same as the groups, then that would be a great middle ground solution. Groups are listed on my forum, you just cannot see the members as a guest. Here is an example. As a logged in user you can see the group members.