I get what you are saying about SSL and I agree fully, and also use letsencrypt, but we still charge for the work and setup. Also, for development, I don't want to mess around with SSL until the site goes live.
There's still a bug though. I have these in my site.config which shouldn't be requiring SSL.
<add key="SSLIsAvailable" value="false" />
<add key="SSLIsRequiredByWebServer" value="false" />
<add key="Site9-SSLIsAvailable" value="false" />
If you go to my demo site which is site 9:
http://rookana.proactivedesign.net/about
Try clicking through the main nav. The URLs are all HTTPS despite the site.config settings above. You can switch the page manually to non-https and it works, but the nav if clicked will take you back to https if you click on anything. So I think the bug is actually in the way the nav is rendering?? The page itself doesn't redirect, it's just the nav links don't seem to be looking at the config setting and instead looking at the DB field UseSSLOnAllPages.
If I go into the database and turn that UseSSLOnAllPages to false then the nav works as expected.
I really think SSL needs to be an option for testing and development or some kind of other issue with the certificate where it needs to be turned off temporarily even. Most other tools, stores, CMS systems allow for non-SSL. You woulnd't want to install the CMS and immediately nothing works because it's requiring SSL setup first.