Also, of course The Master claimed his TARDIS was superior. He could be riding a tricycle with two flat tires, and he’d still declaim at length about how much better his ride was than the Doctors.
So clearly another “point” of a TARDIS is for Time Lords to measure their two dicks.
Mine’s bigger on the inside.
You think that with their advanced technology the Time Lord’s would build a vehicle where you can sit down and drive.
I suspect with their technology, the inside of a TARDIS is highly customizable. Like they could make it whatever they want. Almost like an infinite Star Trek holodeck.
In fact, I’ve always wondered why Federation starships weren’t all holodeck to make them super-customizable. I mean aside from the fact that it would appear to be the third most accident-prone Trek technology besides the transporter and the anti-mater containment field.
What about the warp core? How many times are the words “warp core” said on Star Trek without the next words being “breach imminent”?
My local PBS station has been playing the old Pertwee episodes, I recently saw one in which the Doctor convinced the people in an English town that he was a magician because he had a remote control for his car and was able to move it when not in it.
In the short film Time Crash, where Ten meets Five in Ten’s Tardis, Five says “You’ve changed the desktop theme. What’s this one? Coral? It’s worse than the leopardskin!”
My view is similar although I would say that with infinite size the TARDIS contains every conceivable thing in the universe, its just a question of which parts are configured to be easily accessible at a given time.
Which brings up my question, as to why he couldn’t configure the TARDIS to run by remote control. At least half of the sticky situations he gets into could be easily solved if he could just summon the TARDIS to his current location. But then of course then the show wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. 
Some eps did. As a very minor plot point, tho. 2 & 5 and maybe 6.
Same reason Kirk et al. couldn’t work the transporter by remote control! 
Huh. Here I was thinking it was smaller on the outside.
In the late 70s there used to be a weekly Doctor Who comic available in the UK (which later on changes into a monthly magazine). It periodically had comic stories featuring the Time Lords and sometimes their TARDISes were shown (eg. Four-D War). In the non-chameleon state they were featureless white boxes with fancy door mechanisms that opened a whole side of the TARDIS at once. Point is they were shown as featureless and functional rather than fancy and police-boxey. I reckon The Doctor just did odd things as flights of fancy, and being so big inside he just plain forgot what he did - or where he left it.
Yes. “This Side of Paradise” would have been a non-event if it were possible to flip open the communicator and say “Computer, one person to beam up, these coordinates”.
They still don’t know what the round things are for, though.
What was the point in the USS Enterprise 1701-D having a holodeck?
The TARDIS is a vessel of exploration. Quite obviously it’s designed to be lived in for long periods of time. Why wouldn’t it have amenities? Especially as volume & mass aren’t an issue.
You generally don’t use a care as a base for scientific study. Think of a TARDIS more of a mobile home type vehicle, or an extended-trip boat. It’s not just a vehicle, it’s a place you live for awhile.
It may be necessary to have some sort of AI to handle the time travel. Or they just find it handy to have an intelligent vehicle, just as we find it convenient to have such unnecessary items in our cars as a GPS or tire pressure sensors.
^ This. The Time Lords as a whole are not particularly nice people. In fact, they were quite capable of atrocities of all sorts. The Doctor associating with humans had a lot to do with his current ethics and morality, such as they are (a bit shaky in spots), which is pretty alarming considering what dicks humans can be. We’re nice compared to Gallifreyans.
They may have been mass grown, but I don’t recall it being implied that every Time Lord had his or her own.
In “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS” we find out there is a “bespoke engineering” facility on board that can basically build you whatever you want. I’m guessing this accounts for a lot of the customization we see in the Doctor’s TARDIS.
Which might be another reason for the AI – the Time Lord says “build this thing that does that” and the TARDIS has to figure out how to do it.
Hinted? In “Underworld” it was explicitly stated they had. But remember, Time Lord history encompasses a billion years (more or less – I’m assuming they used a round number). It would be weird if they didn’t act in different ways at different times, cultures don’t remain static, not even the one on Gallifrey.
Of course, the basic answer to the OP is “The needs of the plot … outweigh … the needs of the few. Or the one (episode).”
What is pretty cool, tho, is how entertaining the series continues to be. Sure, sometimes it all gets a little top heavy,or already established canon gets ignored, or things get said or done once and never revisted, but it all sticks together rather well.
TARDIS - Accept no substitute.
In the first minute is an un-chameleonized TARDIS.
Where?