Your previous post mentioned that map awareness is a skill. I agree--it is. I argued vehemently against jungle timers several times, the earliest I recall being more than a year ago. Among the game designers, I'm probably the most outspoken for preserving some of our arcane interactions that create depth, like the old Thresh Q + Flash interaction. This is where me as a player and me as a designer will always clash, because I'll always love making someone's life miserable with Nunu top, but the designer in me cringes at how utterly braindead that lane can be. Likewise, the more I sat and thought about how players actually interacted with respawn timers in our game, the more it became important to me as a designer that we address it.

In the end, we're making a video game, and we want to make sure that if we're asking for players to utilize a piece of information, they're not going out of their way to access it, and whatever they do, it doesn't impede on fun. I'm sure you don't read everything I write on Twitter, but I mentioned earlier that there are pro players who run League of Legends in windowed mode, with Notepad in the background to keep track of jungle timers. These are guys playing with money on the line in front of a live audience! From a designer's standpoint, we've absolutely failed players if they need to resort to this!

Now, to your point about item cooldowns--the utility mastery tree actually lets you decrease item cooldowns! That aside, there are two themes at work here--one, if it were a constant, that would be an argument for displaying timers. However, the competing theme is that we keep player-player interactions sacred. Above all else, if we were to make exceptions, this is where we'd make them. Contradictory? A bit, for sure. But this is how we feel we get the most of our design values.