It seems this behavior is seen in Klingon verbs like meQ, where -moH is sometimes dropped. Perhaps this happens due to your out-of-universe explanation, but an in-universe explanation would be the desire for brevity, combined with pragmatics.
Wait, who determined that -moH is sometimes dropped from
meQ, and how did they determine it? I recognize that meQ
is first defined and used for us as burn and is used
several times with the subject being the thing that is on fire,
and that KGT used it transitively with the thing on fire as the
object, but how do you go from that to saying the mechanism behind
this is a dropped -moH? How do you know it isn't just
that the subject and object of the verb are flexible in the same
way that English burn is? (Which is probably the reason
why the usage changed.) Or some other explanation I haven't
thought of?
I'd cite this as an example of the deliberate disuse of pragmatics: resolving ambiguity by following a strict usage rule rather than choosing the most likely possibility as the speaker's intent.
You can't just declare that anything that seems wrong, but that
you can manage to understand anyway, is done intentionally and to
be accepted. I can usually understand Bingon, but I'm not going to
call it acceptable language variation. You can hypothesize
something like this, but it's just speculation, especially if you
simply label every Englishism you see in this way.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name