So many dumb takes. No, it's not because Americans aim for 5:00/mile. No, it's not because the Olympic trials standard is 2:19.
It's the talent pipeline. In the U.S., the distance running talent pipeline goes like this:
The best high school distance runners excel at 800m-5K XC. If they do quite well, they move on to college running. There are lots of college teams, and many thousands of the best runners continue.
The best college distance runners excel at 800-10K. At the end of college, the funnel for having a viable career as a pro runner is exceptionally tight. Out of thousands of college runners, maybe a few dozen stand out enough to get a pro contract that allows them to continue training at a high level.
And look at the results: we have recent world leaders, Olympic medals and top 10 finishers at 800m-10K.
Now look at the marathon pipeline. If you've got the genetics for great marathon running, you're probably a decent but unspectacular 3200/5K runner in HS. Maybe you run in college, maybe not. In college, you're a pretty good 10K runner, but you don't really have the wheels for 5K and below. Basically, a niche player. Probably not getting a scholarship, although you might be solid scorer for your XC team. When your college career ends, you probably haven't done the kinds of things that get shoe companies to throw money at you. You can move to the roads and finally train for the distances that suit you best (if you're even aware of that fact, instead of thinking of yourself as too slow to really be any good at top-level running), but it's on your own dime while you're trying to establish a career. Anyone looking at it rationally decides to enjoy a few decades of hobby jogging at best.
So that's where we are today. A few stars who can succeed at any distance from 1500-marathon show up every year, but there's no reason to think they're better marathon runners than the kids who would succeed specifically at that distance. And we select against those kids at the HS level, then again at the college level, then again when handing out pro contracts.
If you want to see a few sub-2:05 marathoners, then we need a lot more sub-2:10 marathoners. If we want sub-2:10 to be common, we need way more sub-2:20 marathoners, followed by an army of sub-2:30 marathoners. The shortest path to get there is by bringing the marathon and/or HM into the NCAA system somehow so college-age marathon talent can be identified.
So it would be dumb and counterproductive to set the OTQ standard to 2:12 or whatever, because it would kick out one of the few supports remaining for the sub-2:20 crowd. It would just speed up the process of reducing U.S. men's marathoning to Galen Rupp (one of those stars at any distance), who's not all that far from retiring and being replaced by no one.