[anyfoo]

Because the bases are all wrong. Common number bases are 10, 16, maybe 8 if you live in the 70s, and 2.

Except for the utterly unwieldy binary, none of those bases adapt well to the bases used in representing time, which are mostly the (partially related) bases 60, 12, and, annoyingly, thirty-ish.

So you always end up doing opaque arithmetic instead of “just looking at the digits” (which you still can do in decimal for century vs years for example, because we defined centuries to be exactly that).