Czar,

Your point about my argument as (inelegantly) stated is correct, but I was trying to get at the handiness of the units of relative and different size (inch, foot, yard), as opposed to the reduction to numbers of relatively many significant figures for commonly-used lengths. There’s just nothing between the meter and centimeter to break things up into handily—although I remember as a kid thinking the decimeter (which no one ever uses) was a useful, different length (about four inches, or to be more abstruse, a bit less than half a span [which no one ever uses either—possibly because it’s simply nine inches or three-quarters of a foot]).

Obviously, native users of the metric system will find the imperial system rather balky from the outside, but some of them evidently do come to appreciate its handiness as an evolved system for accomplishing tasks, rather than a rationally designed top-down master system (which is, to bolster your points, very, very good for dealing with things that are tiny or huge, and calculation with which is fairly simple).

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.