It's a simple mechanical artefact. Carriage return moves the paper carriage all the way to the right (returning it to its initial position), while line feed will advance the paper vertically (feeding a line through the carriage). With that in mind, line feed and carriage return on their own make about as little sense.
On later type writers both the line feed and carriage return were integrated into a single key or lever, which was just called carriage return or return. From this perspective, an encoding using a lone CR for newlines might make more sense than one using a lone LF. But neither combination really makes intuitive sense in buffered, electronic systems. It's just how it is.
