If you understand that the housing and electronics are co-dependent on one another then you should understand why that makes no sense.
When Ford initially designed (or had designed) the meter it was with a SPECIFIC sensor installed in a SPECIFIC meter housing. There was an acceptable tolerance and error margin built into the final product. That margin of error was designed to be WITHIN the EEC's ability to compensate for with its adaptive strategy.
So.... Meter X and Sensor Y make up a MAF designed to SPECIFICALLY to function correctly with EEC A on engine B.
The sensor itself is fitted into a housing and measures say, 5% of the air that passes through the housing. It doesn't measure all of the air... just a small portion of it. A flow bench machine was used to ensure that, that 5% of the air is an ACCURATE sample of all the air that is passed though the entire housing under a LOT of different conditions. Small adjustments are made here and there to the housing itself to relieve errors caused by rough air flow, vortexes, etc. When it's finally right, it's packed up and delivered to the assembly line.
And then.... Billy-Bob while sitting in his mom's garage one day, gets this great idea. He can stuff those electronics into a larger housing to get even MORE air! Yeeeeeeeeeeeee-Haaaaaaaaaw. Only trouble is: Billy didn't realize that only 5% of the air mass was being measured. Low and behold, the car ran like crap. So what does he do, you ask? He creates a removable sample tube and reduces the amount of air being sampled from 5% to 1% to compensate for all the additional air passing through the housing. Billy has another great idea... he can toss larger injectors into the mix and use the sample tubes to fool the computer even more! GREAT! So Billy tries a bunch of different sample tube opening and learns that he can run 30 lb injectors and make the car run half decent if uses a really tiny opening in the sample tube.
Trouble is... Billy is now only sampling .2% of the air entering the meter housing and what's more... For some reason windy days make the car stutter.
On calm days though, Billy's invention works pretty well except for low speed driving. 
Hmmmm. I guess .2% of 50 CFM at just off idle, isn't a lot to make a significant change in voltage on that sensor. Go figure. 
Now... C&L APPEARS to be slowly getting better. They appear to be taking a little more time and putting in a little more effort. SOME of their newer housing are pretty nice from what I hear. Those are fixed housing with no removable sample tubes though.
If you think there's no errors to be made in manufacturing JUST THE HOUSING on a mass air meter, you'd be sadly mistaken.
