It's just one of many stupid little things they put in the game that no one ever asked for.
I do wonder how stuff like that gets put in the game, don't they all have meetings to decide how to change the game? I've tried to imagining what the meetings would be like, I assume something like...
[bob] I have an idea! Let's make recall and gate spells not work in Fel dungeons so that NO ONE will EVER go in them and we will have these big empty useless dungeons!
[fred] Great idea bob! I have one too, How about not letting players use recall or gate spells during fights even if they are ghosts or several screens away from the person they were fighting!
[tom] Woohoo wonderful idea fred, I have one too! Players are having too much fun with the provocation skill, let's make it useless so they won't use it anymore!
I'm not even doing that as a joke, I seriously wonder why junk like that is put into this game...I even remember the "noto patch"...what were they thinking with that?
It was like,
[UO dev team] Ok PKing has become a problem so heres the solution, lets make it to where EVERYONE can kill a certain number of players every day and stay blue, this will definitely fix our rampant PK problem!