You made me curious. I find a couple of older posts with essentially the answer above. However, if you look at, say municipal water valves, the laying lengths of gate valves do not match up to either the long or the short body butterfly valves. (There's also a wafer valve, which lacks the full flanges.)
With the short-body style, the disk can actually extend beyond the flange face when open, so you can't necessarily fully open a short-body valve with a blind flange attached. But then again, I'm not sure why you'd need to do that, either.