Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
In my humble opinion, Grothendieck's main motivation for introducing the Axiom of Universes was to make Category Theory Bourbaki compatible. Actually, this is implicit in Harry Gindi's statement of the question. Harry writes "this relative approach makes proper classes pointless". But from Bourbaki's perspective, the expression "proper class" just doesn't make sense. In short (in my interpretation of Grothendieck's thought) the function of this axiom was to make Category Theory soundly founded.
(My browser can't read your k!) I hesitated to give this argument. I told myself "the most naive way to attach a subset to a permutation is to form the set of fixed points" ...