[Dig1t]

Well my point with the examples was not the ".78" part, it was the "7" vs "17".

In your counter example, I would just round the imperial units to 5 feet 11 inches or 6 feet in everyday conversation. My point is that whether it's 180 vs 18 vs 1.8 all of those powers of ten are just a little bit less ergonomic because they do not fit nicely onto my two counting hands. 5 and 6 do fit nicely on my hands (and in my head) and so are just a tiny bit nicer to use every day.

To be honest, if the meter was closer to the size of a foot the metric system would have the same advantage. The powers of ten part is the good part of the system, not necessarily the absolute sizes of the base units.

I agree that if I grew up with it I would think it is fine. It is just what you're used to. I'm just expressing an opinion, I don't know why everyone needs to downvote me, I keep saying that metric is better.

[mvdtnz]

When was the last time you, uhh, tallied up someone's height with your fingers? I don't understand what you're getting at here?

[avmich]

As I understand, the starting point looks to be that you most often deal with single digit numbers of imperial units, but in metric it's less often the case, and that's inconvenient. While I'd generally agree that a single digit is slightly easier to deal with mentally, I'd be skeptical on whether imperials are that much better covering convenient ranges. For distances similar to inches, feet and yards you have centimeters, decimeters and meters, which are pretty close, but still with added benefit of simplicity and uniformity.

Metrics allow to look into much large range inside the same system, which allows quick mental estimations; converting parts of an inch into feet or yards are less convenient. Then we can talk about areas and volumes, where metrics multiply nicely, but with imperials there's a whole set of special units.