I thought the same thing at first. There was a great deal of discussion on this and the short version is that maintenance is something we should be doing anyway and that many people have back doors to their boxes. Promoting new boxes was high on the list and keeping rules to a minimum was also a goal.
Maintenance is also a lot harder to verify. Yes, this is all on the honor system. I am certainly not going to physically check every box that someone claims to have hiked to when they report their miles before sending them their pathtag. Technically, first time plants and finds do have the capacity to be proven by the existence of the box or your signature in the log. That is not necessarily the case with maintenance and it would be much easier to "fudge".
There are more than enough boxes out there that counting miles for places we have already been shouldn't be necessary.
Those were among the reasons for not including miles hiked for maintenance.

That being said, I am not opposed to counting maintenance miles, but there would have to be some ground rules. For example, I think if we do count maintenance, it should only be counted once for any given box or series. Not once a month or even once a year, but only once. Hikes with a one mile minimum, not stringing shorter hikes together, and the other restrictions should apply as well. And all hiking has to be after the official Illinois start date, which was 4/24/09.
I also think there should be a consensus. To my knowledge, only New York counts their miles differently. Since you do not have to be a resident of Illinois to earn the Illinois pathtags, it might be confusing for others if we decide to count differently than everyone else.

What this boils down to is the honor system. I'm not going to be the pathtag police.

S

"Me, I'm Dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, Honestly ...it's the honest ones you want to watch out for 'cause you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid!"