Knowing the latest value of a list is really useful. Having to navigate the whole chain will quickly get boring/slow.
Maybe registers were trying to do too many things. Having a complimentary type that is a register in the traditional sense could be handy - a single/current value, with no history. Used like a variable.
It could be used as a ‘pointer’ to a transaction on the transaction list/tree.
Could be a common/shared version or private ones. Common/shared could be abused, but a rescan would overcome.
Edit: btw, I used HEAD in the git context, rather than linked list parlance. To be clear, getting the TAIL or last/most recent node is my concern.