[bialpio]

Sorry, I dabble with woodworking and disagree heavily. I usually don't care for bigger precision than 1mm (so between 1/16" and 1/32"), and adding things up is a nightmare ("umm... 7 3/16" + 2 1/8" + 5 1/4" is... where's a goddamn pen & paper..."). Same with figuring out which line is which fraction of an inch on measuring tools. Things became tolerable once I got metric measuring tape.

[foobarian]

Once you get past the dabbling stage it starts to get pretty natural. I don't think either system is better, the value is mostly tied up with what's on the shelves at the local home center and how your measuring tools are marked.

[bialpio]

It's already natural when using metric, so I'll stick to it.

[mitthrowaway2]

The stuff on the shelves is rarely sized precisely enough for the units to matter. I've bought 1/4" ply that measured much closer to 6.0 mm than to 1/4".

[jjoonathan]

Sure, if tools are dirt cheap you can just sacrifice to Benford's Law and use base 10. If tools are not cheap, you'll learn to use base 2, one way or another.

[bialpio]

I doubt I'll ever be able to quickly add fractions in base-2 (it doesn't happen often enough to train this), so pen+paper will always be a necessity if I wanted to stick to imperial. I could see getting the intuition for "which line is the eights vs sixteenths" over time though, but if the one-off calculations are going to be such a pain, I don't really see a point.