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Why doesn't Muay Thai incorporate the Karate/TKD Front Snap Kick? Muay Thai instead has a Teep kick with slightly different motion.
I understand why Muay Thai has its own roundhouse kick, as its more fluid rotation, faster motion, and more power with hip and legs. Wanted to learn why the Karate/Taekwondo kick is not efficient in Muay Thai.
It comes down to the same reasons which hold for the different roundhouse kick: power and dmg vs. speed and predictability. Thai fighters have a different goal compared to karate and TKD fighters as they have different rulesets: Muay Thai fighters don't want to touch, they want to penetrate.
That is the reason why Muay Thai doesn't mind if there is slightly more reaction time for the opponent (since their kick cannot be "nullified" by a flick of the arm). Compare MT and kyokushin karate (also full contact and KO rules) front kicks and you will find that they are doing the exact same thing.
Now, if you look at the snap kick, you'll notice that your kick direction is mainly up. It may be devastating if you happen to be able to do a snap kick behind and under the rib cage - a rationale I once heard to justify this type of kick in actual fights - but that is virtually impossible against a live, moving opponent. Instead, you want to be as snappy as possible so that your leg isn't caught while having the direction of force to penetrate your opponent, ie. directly frontwards. This necessitates exactly what you observe here: while you also have to lift your knee up, your heel will move in a more or less straight line from your hip towards the point of contact. And since you want to maximize damage (physically, the pressure into the opponent's body), you minimize the area of contact (pressure = force per area). Et voilà, a teep kick.
That being said, the TKD kick shown above is obviously great to kick between the legs in the groin fast and hard...it's just that this is forbidden by the rulesets of any competitive martial art.
First of all, both approaches are valid and quite useful. A modern martial artist should be able to do both.
Why the divergent approach? It's hard to say because it's so thoroughly a historical-cultural difference rather than a true philosophical choice, which means it often comes down to luck or personal preferences of unknown people in the unrecorded past.
Nevertheless, one explanation that I find persuasive is that the Japanese/Korean karate philosophy is extremely different from Muay Thai judging and its value system.
The former is strongly influenced by a military fetish, thus highly valuing orderly regimentation (especially for large groups) and a somewhat unrealistic elevation of the "one hit one kill" philosophy. This happened to evolve into extremely low-volume, partial-contact competitions largely dependent on reaction time, featuring single explosive attacks that one can argue would have been disabling had the strike not been pulled before impact. Under these conditions the snap kick is an extremely low-risk, high-reward tool.
In contrast, muay Thai is strongly influenced by a very specific tradition of frequent, public, full-contact, one-on-one competition that involved getting paid either directly or through betting. This happened to lead to one particular (logical) strategy: avoiding high-risk, high-damage affairs, because the upside of a bloody fight today isn't justified by the downside of not being able to fight next week and thus missing out on future income.
This in turn happened to create judging criteria that valued demonstrating composure and thus a desire to disrupt the composure of one's opponent. Forcing your opponent to stumble or limp thus became a high-value tactic. Two logical tools to reach for in this case are a strong round kicks (whether to the thigh muscle, body, or head) and a push kick, both of which we see in abundance in muay Thai. These strikes are quite good at forcing the opponent out of their stance when the whole point is to no-sell every attack.
(An aside: the Okinawan karate tradition actually contains both kicks, though its teep-like push kick has fallen out of popularity in proportion to the degree it borrows from the Japanese-style large-group approach.)
Another major reason after speaking with Muay Thai Coach who fought professionally, if you use a snap kick with the toes up, an opponent can simply block place his elbow above, and this may break your toes/feet bones. Using a push teep, will alleviate this issue.
