I suspect it's only the common case because you design with currying in mind in the first place.
I don't think currying is a kludge. I think functions like flip are kludges to work around the fact that currying is not as general as it should be.
And once again, do you know the actual theoretical background for currying? My main point is that currying was never designed to be useful - it was designed as a theoretical tool in lambda calculus. The fact that it is useful is a side effect, but there's no real reason to use it instead of a more general and more useful model for partial evaluation, except for the underlying theory, which is of no practical consequence.