The reason you have kinetic scrolling on touch screen devices is because you can not scroll more than one screen's worth of list without lifting and replacing your finger/stylus without it (or similar acceleration tricks).
On devices with scroll wheels you can scroll forever without lifting a finger and so it is not needed, and the decrease in precision it costs has no benefit outside eye candy.
There was a time when one could possibly charge the Rockbox development community with being anti-eye candy, but I think the last few years worth of (seemingly) rapid GUI changes can put that to rest.
While I think it is clear Rockbox is not anti-eye candy, the development team is definitely against eye candy which decreases usability, especially usability for the vision-impaired community.