What's the rationale behind not going full 448 or at least 256 like AES and Twofish?
Age. At the time Blowfish was adopted there were literally no 256-bit ciphers in the RFC2440 suite. Symmetric ciphers were all 128-bit (except arguably for 3DES, where the size is wonky[*]). The first 256-bit cipher to be added was Twofish in mid-2000 in PGP 7, followed soon by AES in PGP 7.1.
[*] 3DES can credibly be claimed to have a 192-bit key, a 168-bit key, or a 112-bit key, depending on how the speaker defines "key".
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