Yes, but suppose you cut that in half. 9 inches minus a blade is 8 7/8, divided by 2 gives you 4 and 7/16.
That is quick to do in your head and there was very little room for error.
If you had to do that in metric, you're having to do division with 6 significant figures.
Lets say 100 mm, minus a 3.175 mm blade gives you uhhh 96.825, divided by 2 and that's wait, let me get my phone to make sure one minute OK that's 48.4125.
If you add arbitrary measurements back together, it just gets you even worse numbers, whereas imperial stays with fractions of powers of 2 and tends to stay at the same denominator or even simpler ones more frequently than metric will let you work with fewer significant figures.
Yes, but suppose you cut that in half. 9 inches minus a blade is 8 7/8, divided by 2 gives you 4 and 7/16.
That is quick to do in your head and there was very little room for error. If you had to do that in metric, you're having to do division with 6 significant figures.
Lets say 100 mm, minus a 3.175 mm blade gives you uhhh 96.825, divided by 2 and that's wait, let me get my phone to make sure one minute OK that's 48.4125.
If you add arbitrary measurements back together, it just gets you even worse numbers, whereas imperial stays with fractions of powers of 2 and tends to stay at the same denominator or even simpler ones more frequently than metric will let you work with fewer significant figures.
Fair enough