The Internet Correction Squad would like to remind you that 1) they are different programs that do different things, 2) if they changed over time, they wouldn't be portable, 3) if all you use awk for is '{print $2}', that is perfectly fine.
You can submit a new feature request/patch to GNU coreutils' cut, but they'll probably just tell you to use awk.
One of the bad things about having an ultra-stable core of GNU utils as that they've largely ossified over time. Even truly useful improvements can often no longer get in.
It's a sharp and not-entirely-welcome change from the 80s and 90s.
Here's another that would be great but will never be added: I want bash's "wait" to take an integer argument, causing it to wait until only that number (at most) of background processes are still running. That would make it almost trivial to write small shell scripts that could easily utilize my available CPU cores.
You can submit a new feature request/patch to GNU coreutils' cut, but they'll probably just tell you to use awk.
Edit: Nevermind, it's already a rejected feature request: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-09/msg... (from https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.htm...)