It is not the intent of D1.1 to provide direction to the welder.

Recent editions of D1.1 have become less user friendly starting with the a couple of editions prior to the 2015 edition.

An example is a cautionary  footnote in the approved base metal table (3.1) regarding vanadium bearing steels. In earlier editions of D1.1 the footnote listed the ASTM material specifications of the base metals that were a concern. Now the footnote leaves it up to the user to figure out whether the footnote applies to the base metal they are using.

Over the years the people sitting on the committee change and with those changes come different ideas and philosophies. Some good, some bad, all depending on one's perspective. D1.1 as well as other AWS codes and standards are intended primarily for designers and engineers that have more training and education than the average welder. I am not trying to slight welders, but many simply do not have the background in material science or engineering to understand how specific provisions of the code are  applied. 

Consider the CWI examination, it is designed to force the candidate to look up a requirement, but it does not require the candidate to determine how the provision is applied to a specific situation. The examination is navigational; can one find the provision in the code? No interpretation of the provision is required to pass the examination. A few question require the candidate to apply the information provided, but interpretation of a provision is not part of the examination. Most questions are "black or white."

In your question, someone familiar with how steels are manufactured would recognize the difference in the "as rolled" condition and steels with improved mechanical properties resulting from additional processing, i.e., quenching and tempering (Q&T), thermo-mechanically controlled processing (TCMP), and quenching and self tempering steels (Q&ST).

Personally, I prefer the code editions that provided more information so that people like me could better understand what I needed to be aware of. It isn't just the welding codes, similar changes have been made to the filler metal specifications. Consider A5.18; it used to provide recommendations on what filler metal is better suited to short circuiting transfer and which were better suited for spray or globular transfer. Those recommendations are history.

Consider the new filler metal specification (A5.36) for FCAW. The new classification system includes 12 alpha numeric designators. The shielding gas designator alone has 18 possible entries. There are 18 different possibilities for the usability characteristics, 11 different possible entries for notch toughness, and 8 different tensile strength entries. Clearly someone wasn't having enough sex to have enough time and energy to come up with this nightmare. Someone told me it was to harmonize with the ISO standards. One must remember the origins of ISO are European. Do we really need to look to the Europeans for an economic model?

Just a few thoughts from a warped mind.