[jrichardshaw]

Actual research astronomer here, and as a (radio) astronomer I would love to get rid of leap seconds. Assuming that UTC = UT1 (the time measure based on Earth rotation) is not accurate enough for most calculation such that you already need to use UT1 tables/forecasts and leap second tables in your ephemeris calculations so there isn't really much benefit in trying to keep UTC close to UT1. And the reality is that for us they actually make things worse: we stop data acquisition at the telescope over the leap second period because we timestamp our data in UTC dealing with the changing interval would be a pain.

There are some good arguments for keeping leap seconds, but I don't think research astronomy is really one (it might be more useful for amateurs), particularly on ~100 year timescales where you don't expect things to slip that much. I think this sentiment is shared by most of my peers, particularly those who actually have to implement data acquisition and analysis pipelines!