I recently started watching some metalworking videos, and Americans in those use 'thou' (more confusingly aka 'mil') - thousandths of an inch. That seems mostly fine to me, it's a different scale, but whatever, it's just as sane if you don't need it to interact with volumetric measurements etc.
Woodworkers obviously don't need or want the accuracy of the 'thou' digit, but it seems to me that similarly normalising on decimal fractions and using 'huns' or 'around 12x thou' would be an improvement.
But then, they're used to it and happy with it, it's only viewers like me who aren't that are thinking about it!
(I'm British, so use Imperial in some contexts, including casually sizing small things in inches, but probably never fractional other than 1/2".)
It turns out that the thou is a great division for metal working. The even metric are just a little too course, or a little too fine for most metal work. Either way though machinists do great work in either system, to the same fine standards.
Oh I don't doubt it, I'm not saying it's some weird or wonderful exclusively American thing, I'm just too young to be aware of it from anywhere else, and suggesting that it or similar (tenths, hundredths) would be an improvement on 2^x denominated fractions even in applications that don't need such accuracy.
Put another way, I think if everyone (not just precision applications) used decimalised inches, it would just be a different scale and ~nobody would care to say 'omg why don't you use metric'.
The primary advantage of metric is that everyone else uses it. The decimal is useful, but fractions have their place as well, so there isn't a clear win.
Woodworkers obviously don't need or want the accuracy of the 'thou' digit, but it seems to me that similarly normalising on decimal fractions and using 'huns' or 'around 12x thou' would be an improvement.
But then, they're used to it and happy with it, it's only viewers like me who aren't that are thinking about it!
(I'm British, so use Imperial in some contexts, including casually sizing small things in inches, but probably never fractional other than 1/2".)