Actually, it's a technical limitation; in this special case, the information is not written to confd, read from confd like in other places. Instead, the information has to be written into the confd, read from confd, written into a state file which is again read by the confd to be displayed in the webadmin, in order to extend the static information (MAC,name) with "state" information (IP, lastseen time).
This sounds pretty excessive, and the straightforward solution would only add to that complexity, therefore we've opted to go with the minor nuisance of a manual reload for now. Maybe we'll come up with a way to solve this differently.
Cheers,
andreas