[phicoh]

"00:00:00 on January 1, 2020" UTC is a rather useless timestamp for most practical purposes, unless you live close to th zero meridian. In most places you want to talk about 00:00:00 on January 1, 2020 localtime, which depends on what timezone you are in, and of course the daylight savings rules. Both can change. In some countries, daylight seems to be even more random than leap seconds.

In my opinion, the real problem is that TAI is not an option in most current systems. There is no way to get the time in TAI, no way to convert between TAI and UTC etc.

So even in applications where it makes sense to use TAI (think logging and billing) we don't do that because the necessary infrastructure is not available.

I think it is time that the technical community gets together can make TAI a first class citizen.

TAI doesn't help with timestamps in the future, but usually those applications don't need second level granularity anyhow. The applications that break during a leap second are the ones that need to track the current time or passage of time with sub-second accuracy. And those can be served perfectly with TAI.