I think a lot of this is the digitisation of the change bucket at the till. When we all paid in cash you would be handed 3 pennies and now need to find somewhere to put it. It's not worth anything and now you need to carry it about. You could walk off and not take it. Here is a pot you can put it in and it will make you feel better about yourself.
The same as the tip request it's a new spin on an old concept. Perhaps it's a bit wooden but it's a shift from manly cash society to mainly card payment systems.
I would like one settings menu to rule them all. Even if the settings menus links you out to a dialog box that's better than "Look up control panel for the other half of the settings" and " we moved some of the network settings but not all". Who are that testing these systems on?