1) The premise of a hash function is that you are going to take a large set of inputs and map it to a small set of outputs such that you don't find collisions, with the use case that the result is somehow so unique that the input file can be henceforth named by its hash and looked up in some giant dictionary of everything we have so far ever bothered to hash.
The hash is this tiny bit of information, and somehow is expected to be sufficient to uniquely describe some arbitrarily large amount of information? That just flies in the face of the naive expectation. The only argument that it is even sort of reasonable to expect would be the idea that while there are an insane number of files very similar but not quite your file, very few of them are "interesting" to a human in any way, and so the set of "interesting" files might be super small... but it isn't like we designed the hash functions to know that.
The reality that it seemingly can be done well enough that no one notices most of the time is fascinating and surprising--the kind of thing that inspires awe and wonder at the universe if true or calls into question our hubris if it isn't--not something obvious in the way the existence of symmetric ciphers nor something reasonable to expect in the way asymmetric ciphers are: to the extent to which reality lets us pull this one off we should be thankful.
2) If one can truly "easily" derive a "secure" hash function from a secure symmetric cipher, then why don't we ever have secure hash functions, despite seemingly having secure symmetric ciphers? If this is so easy, I suggest you do it and then wait 30 years and see if someone figures out how to break it (and we can see it AES is still holding strong).