It looks like that because feature matrices aren't especially helpful
for newbies to make a decision, especially when the "features" in
question were often things like how they handled the block chain or
which protocol standards they support, ie, things only of interest to
developers.
A well-designed feature matrix can quite useful and user-friendly.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/compare-ipod-models/
Prose is better to get a sense of the philosophy and basic idea of a
client. If it was between having only a feature matrix or only prose,
I'd probably go for the prose as well.
What a feature matrix is good at though is it allows you to very quickly
find the specific feature or general criteria you're looking for without
reading through all of the text. So it might be a useful addition maybe
not on Bitcoin.org, but certainly on the wiki.
If we're keeping the clients page, I would really like to see the
feature matrix linked from that page. It shouldn't be on that main
clients page (for the reasons already stated), but Stefan makes a
point that