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I have been making the following pie dough for a while (with great results): https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/06/old-fashioned-flaky-pie-dough-recipe.html

Recently I made some rough puff pastry using this recipe (also great results): https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/06/fast-easy-short-cut-blitz-puff-pastry-recipe.html

What struck me as odd is that both the recipes and the processes are nearly the same. The puff does get bigger in the oven, presumably because of the extra folds. But this got me wondering: What is the defining difference between these doughs?

Why are pie recipes calling for puff pastry so uncommon?

Really, the difference is the process -- full sheets of butter results in layers of the dough which allows it to puff up.

But it's a lot of work for a crust that's going to just be bogged down toppings. And if it's too flaky, it has no structural integrity -- it breaks apart as you're trying to eat it, making it pretty useless as a crust. That's part of why some pie crust instructions call for docking the dough and using weights if you're blind baking it.

Now, what you linked to isn't actually true puff pastry. It's what's called 'rough puff', where it's not quite as laborious as you're not dealing with a whole slab of butter ... but it still takes hours to make, as you have to keep it chilled down as you go just as you would normal puff pastry, so the butter doesn't mix with the flour before it goes into the oven. That recipe you linked to has over 4 hours of resting.

So, for something that's not going to functional as well as a pie crust, is the extra time worth it? I'd say no, myself.

The key difference is definitely the extra folds and the butter layer isolating the folded layers of dough.

That layered structure of the puff pastry is what makes it, ehm, puff...