Copyright lasts as long as it does because that's the length of time that Congress believes it should last.
The reason copyright does not end when the work of authorship is no longer publicly available is because that would put the copyright term into the very unsympathetic hands of the publishing industry. Once copyright expires, the work enters the public domain and copyright cannot be reclaimed. What, then, would prevent the original publisher from binding the author in contract, then publishing the work and promptly sending the work out of print, then, a few years later, re-releasing the work in a cheap edition with no royalties attached for the author (copyright expired when the work went o/p, remember)? That way, the publisher would clean up and the author, who worked long and hard on the work of authorship, would get nothing.
Also, a best seller, which remains publicly available for a long time (think "Harry Potter"), would retain copyright basically forever while a lesser-known work might lose copyright after about five years; again, your scenario puts the term of copyright in the hands of the publishers, not of the issuing governmental agency (the Library of Congress).
THIS POST CONTAINS GENERAL INFORMATION AND IS INTENDED FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. IT DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE, NOR DOES IT CREATE ANY ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. FOR LEGAL ADVICE ON YOUR PARTICULAR MATTER, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.
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