(Actually, what I wished for was slightly different: only the high byte of the effective address would be fetched from zero page, the low byte being the Y register. In this way, one could keep both bytes of the pointer in zero page, LDY the low byte and use my zp indirect mode. The first use of a pointer would cost an extra instruction / 2 cycles, but further uses of the same pointer would be cheaper.)
The 6502 did intentionally away with quite a number of features, but, as it had since become evident that it was a computer CPU, WDC added (back) for the CMOS version some of what was kind of missing for this application.
(The thing I'm probably missing most on the 6502 is a sequential-shift or barrel-shifter, shifting/rotating by multiple bit positions at once. This would be so great for games, graphics, encoding and decoding… Sophie Wilson had the wisdom to opt this into the ARM architecture.)