People that don’t understand the usefulness of 12, 3, 4, 2, 6,and where those numbers are best used crack me up.
As to the argument about “Whitworth” measurements, I’d point out that there are other “odd” systems around, including Torx, TorxII, Allen heads, Phillips heads, and on and on. (Plumbing fixtures? Good luck!) Some are useful, but some are headed to the dustbin of history. BUT, we don’t need the government to decide which of those will make it or not.
I’ve watched the proportions of buildings and vehicles get strange for some time now, and I blame the metric system. It’s arbitrarily forced into base ten because people who relate to numbers like the orderliness of it, no other reason. The scale and proportion produced by this system, however, are just wrong, they’re “off” somehow, just plodding and clunky. They don’t sing like the old measures and proportions. For all their seeming fusty archaicness (is that a word, lol?), I’ll take inches, feet and yards all day long over metric, to produce physically appealing forms, from autos to architecture. They’re human scale, they’ve arisen over millennia and have had staying power for a reason. They’re highly functional in day to day, real world usage, and produce things of beauty.