why are guid’s stored as absolute paths?

Maybe I just don’t know how to use WP properly, but I run a local version on my machine and a live one on the server, and it is annoying how WP stores all the guids in the wp_posts table as absolute: https://dev.server/this/that

There should be an option to select the link format behaviour – absolute [https://i.only.have.one.server/this/that], or root relative [/this/that].

In fact I don’t understand why guids are stored as absolute at all since the blog url is stored in the option table – can’t WP just work URLS by collating site url and root relative guid?

In the end I had to write a plugin to strip all the host names from the guids, and have to remember to run it everytime I upgrade WP. Not ideal.