Using CR for progress bars and overstrikes is a neat hack, sure. But it's a hack. You're using it for cursor control, and there's a lot more to cursor control than just moving to the left without advancing down. TUIs need a lot more than that, and none of it is part of ASCII.
CR and NL were separated for mechanical reasons - namely it took the same time to move to the beginning of a new line as it did to print two characters. That convention stuck because computers were rarely in the loop, so software conversion wasn't an option.
As far as the nascent ARPANET project goes, I doubt it was much of a concern for the ASCII committee. This was the '60s - computing news traveled word-of-mouth or in journals. You couldn't just jump onto the IETC's website and download the latest RFCs. Unless a large organization was pushing things (and DARPA wasn't, not really) people mostly concerned themselves with what they worked on and were familiar with. The ASCII committee would have lots of people familiar with telegraphy, AUTODIN, and similar device-to-device networks. The computer-savvy people would be thinking of tapes and punch cards and other I/O.
If ASCII had come out ten years later, then sure I could see them being concerned about computer text formats.
CR and NL were separated for mechanical reasons - namely it took the same time to move to the beginning of a new line as it did to print two characters. That convention stuck because computers were rarely in the loop, so software conversion wasn't an option.
As far as the nascent ARPANET project goes, I doubt it was much of a concern for the ASCII committee. This was the '60s - computing news traveled word-of-mouth or in journals. You couldn't just jump onto the IETC's website and download the latest RFCs. Unless a large organization was pushing things (and DARPA wasn't, not really) people mostly concerned themselves with what they worked on and were familiar with. The ASCII committee would have lots of people familiar with telegraphy, AUTODIN, and similar device-to-device networks. The computer-savvy people would be thinking of tapes and punch cards and other I/O.
If ASCII had come out ten years later, then sure I could see them being concerned about computer text formats.