I think customizing your site is a lot more work when you allow users to choose their locale. When you edit, for example, the welcome message without allowing other locales, you change one text. When you allow other locales, you have to change it for all locales separately, and when you forget that, not all users will get the same information in the message. It’s the same for theme components like the search banner or welcome link banner. When you look at the international section of Discourse Discover, you can see screenshots with a banner using the default “Welcome to our community” text. When I visited those forums, I noticed many of them did customize the banner text, but they didn’t do it for all locales. So while I see the customized text because the theme component doesn’t offer a default German text, someone with their browser’s language set to English (US) sees the default text, which is what happens when the screenshots are taken. So at the moment this might only affect users with English US as their browser language and it is not that much work to translate this as well. But when English UK is added to the component admins would have to change those stings too and then someone could add German and the next text has to be edited. So you not only have go be aware that you have to change the string for different locale, you also have to notice when new locales are added to customize them.
Allowing other locale can cause a lot more work for admins. In a community where people only communicate in one language, it’s probably not worth the effort. The users have to deal with the language anyway. Only an interface in their language is of little use.
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