On the Cowardace of NYT Spelling Bee, or What Makes a Word

I play the Spelling Bee on the weekend as part of playing word/map games with friends and there always ends up being a bunch of discussion about what words it does/should/shouldn't accept. This weekend we were annoyed hella didn't get accepted and we've been repeatedly annoyed that atlatl doesn't make the cut (fun words should be held to lower standards!). Sometimes a term we feel is too technical makes it and other times common technical terms seem missing because they're outside the purview of a NYT Games editor. That's all fine. It's an unenviable position to decide what is common enough.

Where the cowardice comes in is in word forms. Somewhat famously, Spelling Bee never includes the letter S. Presumably Sam Ezersky and co decided that it would be too much of a slog to type in every plural but it limits the world pool and regularly the puzzle included E-D or I-N-G and those are apparently fine. Where my real frustration usually comes in is that they have decided most -able, de-, non-, and un- words are not wordy enough to count (admittedly, many nonstandard non- words would get a hyphen when written out [nonstandard or course, being a standard word at this point]). If it's such a slog to allow them, why allow -ed and -ing? Why not only allow the base form of a word? It is a strength of the language that I can negate words or morph them into a different part of speech and their meaning will be unambiguous.

Anyway, I didn't play today's puzzle so this isn't about that.