Window AC fan question

[coolguy4]

Hello everyone, I am wondering why every single window AC unit that I know of is designed to suck air in through the sides and exhaust it out the back. The problem with that is the condenser gets dirty on the inside of the unit and the only way to clean it is to remove it from the wall or window, take the case off, and take the fan and shroud off or unscrew the condenser and carefully move it back a few inches so it can be scrubbed clean with a brush. As someone who has 3 window AC units, this pisses me off to no end to have to remove and totally dissemble the units every year to clean the condenser when this would be a non issue if the unit was simply designed to suck air in the back and exhaust it out the sides and top so the crap built up on the accessible part of the coil.

And to make matters worse, the buildup is often hard and really stuck to the coil because window AC units are usually designed so the pan collects condensate water for the fan to fan splash onto the coil to help cool it off. Although likely effective, the wet coil collects a lot of crap and it dries on the coil as very hard sheets that eventually block almost all the airflow.

Lots of perfectly good AC units are getting thrown out because of this stupid flaw. I have gotten several AC units from the trash that needed nothing more than a through cleaning to work perfectly. Just a few days ago my neighbor gave me a 5 year old unit because it wouldn't effectively cool her house anymore. All it took to fix it was about an hour of my time to take it apart and clean the condenser because it was almost totally plugged. This isn't even the worst one I have seen. I showed this to her and she was shocked that the inside was so filthy because she always rinsed the back of the coil every couple months to try to keep it clean. This is what it looked like window ac.jpg

If any of you see a reason why these units need to be designed in this stupid way please let me know because I see no reason for that nonsense other than planned obsolescence.