I'm only saying this because I know what you mean about everything being relative, so I'm working on a third system, superior to both imperial AND metric, and I'm working on it here. You're welcome to join in with any input you have.
It says dwarvish - if this is for a fantasy setting, I'd suggest using something more like imperial measurements. Figure out who in your society actually needs to measure things, give them a bunch of units about the size of the things they measure, don't worry so much that the miners measure length with pickaxe head lengths and the smiths measure lengths in fingers. If they're supposed to be particularly logic-minded, pick the dwarviest base units you can think of (average depth of gold, density of gold) and use the SI approach.
If you were trying to build a real-world better system, I'd start by collecting contexts in which people measure things, then trying to find a way to put them on the same scale. Plank lengths, the square root of a barn, whatever cellular biologists use, a carpentry unit (like an inch), an architecture unit (like a meter), a travel unit (like a kilometer), whatever meteorologists use, an AU, a light year, parsecs. Can you pick similar-enough units such that some of those are 1000x some of the others? It'd make it a lot easier to use some non-base-1000 units, so maybe acknowledge we're never fixing time, and use second-equivalent, minute-equivalent, and day-equivalent units.
I'm only saying this because I know what you mean about everything being relative, so I'm working on a third system, superior to both imperial AND metric, and I'm working on it here. You're welcome to join in with any input you have.
I'm not sure what you're trying to make there.
It says dwarvish - if this is for a fantasy setting, I'd suggest using something more like imperial measurements. Figure out who in your society actually needs to measure things, give them a bunch of units about the size of the things they measure, don't worry so much that the miners measure length with pickaxe head lengths and the smiths measure lengths in fingers. If they're supposed to be particularly logic-minded, pick the dwarviest base units you can think of (average depth of gold, density of gold) and use the SI approach.
If you were trying to build a real-world better system, I'd start by collecting contexts in which people measure things, then trying to find a way to put them on the same scale. Plank lengths, the square root of a barn, whatever cellular biologists use, a carpentry unit (like an inch), an architecture unit (like a meter), a travel unit (like a kilometer), whatever meteorologists use, an AU, a light year, parsecs. Can you pick similar-enough units such that some of those are 1000x some of the others? It'd make it a lot easier to use some non-base-1000 units, so maybe acknowledge we're never fixing time, and use second-equivalent, minute-equivalent, and day-equivalent units.