It would be great if the US had already converted to metric. Most people agree on that. But the challenge of actually getting through the conversion is non-trivial.

Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
When you say the Imperial system is "much more intuitive", surely you just mean it is more intuitive to you, because that is what you know?

Because for me (and I suspect most people who grew up with metrics) the metric system is more intuitive for all the uses you describe. Someone tells me that Mike Tyson's fighting weight was 220 pounds and it means very little, until I convert it to about 104kg - having done that I have a fair idea about his weight.
In general, I'm a big fan of metric, and use it preferentially despite growing up mostly in the US. But for temperature specifically, the fact is that Centigrade uses only 2-4 leading digits for the range of temperatures most people experience, while Fahrenheit uses all ten (and a few over). So °C requires you to care about the second digit to have the same information °F gives you in the first.

(To see why this is important, consider the limiting case of simply using Kelvins instead of °C. Same unit size, more rigorously defined base, even harder to mess up conversions — all the great advantages people always talk about for the metric system! — but you have to look at all three digits to see what approximate range you're in… 301 K is a reasonable temperature, and so is 280 K, but 208 K is a whole different story, and 380 K is no fun for anyone.)

The others don't have such a specific advantage, so I don't know that there's any real objective intuitive advantage there.