There are always exceptions, but the costs of being flexible are considerable. ANSI X9.62, from 1998, specified how elliptic curves were encoded in ASN.1 and included not just 27 possible curves, but allowed the parameters to be inherited from the issuing CA and allowed completely arbitrary elliptic curves to be defined inside a public key. That specifies almost nothing and avoids really standardising on anything. Thankfully I've not seen parameter inheritance implemented for ECC (it would be a security mess) but support for custom elliptic curves does, sadly, exist.
It's not fair to just blame X9.62: don't get me started about RSA PSS. The cost of having too many options is frequently underestimated. Why does AES-192 exist, for example, other than to inflate test matrices?