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One possible intuition for the reverse seems pretty straightforward: the full virus contains countermeasures against the immune system; the vaccine does not (and has a stabilized version of the spike to make sure it's visible to the immune system). On blood vs. mucus membranes, there's research into nasal vaccines, but there's yet to be one that actually shows better protection from severe disease, possibly because the protection from infection just will never be that great because of the way coronaviruses and the human immune system interact and severe disease happens when the virus gets into more into the blood/internal organs.
That's less a proposed mechanism and more the fragment of one. You'd need to connect this to a feature of coronaviruses, which from what I can tell behave in a very textbook way. They're not HIV, for instance.
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Countermeasures against the immune system developing antibodies to it? I'm pretty sure it doesn't; that's kind of the whole point of the immune system. It trains itself to do pattern recognition on foreign objects that have made their way into the body -- having the whole object available for this training seems intrinsically better (or at least just as good) than having only a small part. (which is of course subject to constant mutation)
An actual infection tends to do both, however -- so one might think that it would be the best of both worlds in terms of protection.
A countermeasure is perfectly doable, for example epigenetic/signaletic alterations of the infected cells to overexpress immunosuppressive proteins such as, IDO, phosphatidylserine, PD-1, or some anti inflammatory Interleukins.
However I don't think COVID does that but it's definitely something a future pandemic could do and is something key to cancer cells survival.
There is also the topic of anti-antibodies but I don't know enough about that one.
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And countering the immune system is kind of the whole point of viruses. All viruses have countermeasures against the immune system of some sort. At least, all viruses fit enough for us to notice them, otherwise the immune system would do its job well enough we would never observe them. These countermeasures include hiding the proteins from the immune system that would be the most effective targets for antibodies, which is why we have spike-only vaccines for COVID and why we have to get a new flu vaccine every year (trying to get the immune system to pay attention to the right proteins on the flu virus is an open area of research). The implementation is different but both viruses trick the immune system into primarily targeting the wrong part of the virus. (Viruses can also have more involved countermeasures like taking on shapes close enough to things that are supposed to be in humans that the immune system has trouble targeting them and more directly interfering with the immune system functioning.)
I don't know if this is sufficient to cause the COVID vaccines to provide better immunity than a prior infection, just that it's not a priori obvious without doing the studies.
Yeah, that suggests the research towards doing some of the vaccine doses as shots and some as nasal spray might result in a better vaccine. No results yet... but no one seems to be funding vaccine research very heavily since the initial vaccines were released.
None of this suggests that we would a priori assume that covid (pretty standard yet novel in the particulars coronavirus) infection should provide weaker immunity than the totally novel subunit vaccines -- so shouldn't it require that really clear and conclusive research indicating that this is in fact the case be needed in order to justify treating prior infection any differently than vaccination in terms of restrictions etc?
Once you're talking about things like how we should handle restrictions, you run straight into the problem that it's way easier to have documentation on who has been vaccinated and when than who has been infected and when. IIRC, in Europe restrictions based on vaccination or recent infection did exist in some places. The US does have checks of vaccination or prior infection for some diseases... well, at least chickenpox, not sure of any others, but that's partially because prior infection is a contraindication for that vaccine.
This is total bullshit promoted (mostly) by lazy statists (presuming you are not one of these) -- antibody tests which prove infection do in fact exist, as did testing stations which could just as easily report test results to the relevant authorities as vaccination stations report vaccine status.
Anyways, "it would be inconvenient" is not much of a justification for measures which (absent a reasonable belief that individuals are dangerous to society at large) are clear violations of civil rights -- getting a search warrant is frequently inconvenient for cops, it doesn't mean that they are allowed to bust down doors whenever they feel like it.
So clearly it's not impossible, or even inconvenient to the point where we can't manage it...
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