HP-35’s x^y Why?

[cdmackay]

As a related question, I've often wondered why, after the 28S, HP started including the arguably unnecessary n-th root key, e.g. on 32SII, 48GX, 50g, Prime, when they'd done perfectly fine without it up til then? It doesn't save keystrokes, since it's generally a shifted fn when included.

And presumably that was the reason that 1/x is often next to y^x on earlier calcs?