I think Altair is the only 'original' sector, created in response to the progen trader being introduced.
The other quirk I guess I would mention is it has a little more to do with potential future content if we ever wrote it and to some extent making the planets (or other orbiting objects) and lighting look right sometimes it took some weird quirks like that.
Lastly, at one point there were probably 25 sets of hands working on things too, and not everyone understood how every tool worked. However, it didn't (at the time, at least) negatively affect anything.
Double lastly, there are occasionally objects in some of that dead space, but we sort of stuck those in for 'true' explorers (or just really, really, really, really bored) people.