Why must you create an Author Listing page before you can manage Authors?

[jmurty]

The Authors app at ice kit.page_types.author seems to allow you to add and manage authors in the admin, but if you try and do so on a new site you get a 500 error with the message You need to create a Author Listing Page.

Once you create an instance of an Author Listing page type, then you can indeed manage the Authors app admin area as normal.

But why is a listing page required in the first place? This is super-weird. The culprit code is the Author.parent property method which raises this error, but it would be good to understand why and find a better way of handling things.