Yep, that design oversight was very much a sign of Commodore not expecting the 1541 to be as successful as it became. Maybe it was a nod to dealers, so they could sell $30 worth of service when someone bought that second drive. And that might have been OK, except the majority of us bought our Commodore gear at Kmart or Target. Dual-drive Commodore setups would have been more common if they’d come with that switch from the get-go.

I now (essentially permanently) have a u1541 as my 8 device, and a real physical 1541 as a 9, which allows me to convert real disks to virtual D64 images (for emulation purposes) and back. The only thing my current setup doesn’t make allowance for is booting multi-load original disks — those almost always reference device 8, and few will load from any other device number.