Because a lot of terrible, tragic things had happened to the Doctor. He was burning himself out, rushing from crisis to crisis instead of dealing with his pain. So his regeneration made him a copy of the tenth Doctor to try to prompt him to find Donna Noble. Which is what immediately happened.
Donna was the companion that the Doctor always viewed as his best friend. Unlike Rose or Martha, she was never infatuated with him. She also never looked up to him. She argued, quite forcefully and quite frequently, with him. And when something terrible happened, like having to blow up Vesuvius, she didn’t let him do it alone, but rather took an equal partnership. Donna was the companion who would be able to stand as an equal to the Doctor and say, “Come with me,” in the way that he always does to people. He has outright stated about Donna, “she takes care of me.” That’s who she is to him, and that’s why when he was decompensating and on the edge, he regenerated into the tenth Doctor’s form. He needed to find the person who takes care of him.
These three specials were a way to resolve Donna Noble’s storyline, which was easily the biggest dropped plot thread of the David Tennent era. And also to do something that isn’t really possible in Doctor Who… give the Doctor a happy ending.
Donna gets her memories back and is able to survive with them. She goes on several adventures. She proves both that she can still have adventures when necessary (certainly when people need her), while also being completely satisfied in her life. It is unambiguously happy, and without the complications that so many other companions suffered.
And now there are two Doctors, which allows the fifteenth Doctor to take up the burden of being the Doctor, meaning the fourteenth (tenth) can just take some time to heal. He doesn’t have all of time and space hanging on his shoulders. He can still have little adventures here and there (taking Mel to New York in the Gilded Age, or Rose Noble to Mars) but mostly he can just live a life with friends and loved ones. He spent all that time saving reality, and now he can experience what he was saving it for... something he has never been able to do before.
It’s important that the legacy character they brought back was Mel, and they made a really big deal about how she had no family… like the Doctor. And at the end of the episode both are stated to be members of the Noble-Temple family. Doctor Who is like ongoing comics… there’s no end. The original series lasted twenty-six seasons, and the revived series is now on its thirteenth season. There is no happy ending. The Doctor can not look upon his works and be done. David Tennent’s Doctor is probably the most iconic Doctor of the revived era of Doctor Who. This was Russell T. Davies giving his beloved Doctor and one of his beloved companions the kind of happy ending which is impossible for Doctor Who.
At the start of the episode he says this:
Donna, I'm a billion years old. If I stood and talked about everyone I'd ever met, we'd still be in the TARDIS, yapping.
And at the end:
I've never been so happy in my life.
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