Both have there uses, it would be stupid to use only one.
Yes, this is the right approach to standards.
Okay, so... Metric is
mostly better in that it's consistent. It's consistent between geographical regions, it's consistent between different things you're measuring, it's consistent in its terminology. It is an actual standard whereas Imperial is a bunch of standards (
@Raven of the Burning God 's point shelved for a moment). However it is not the
best standard. Most particularly because it is decimal based. Yes, we have 10 fingers and 10 toes and this is probably why we ended up with base 10 number system but 10 only has two factors. Most of the Imperial measurements are products of 3 or 4.
A very simple example is the pre-Decimalisation British pound. It had 240 pennies in it (or 20 shillings if you like). You're at a restaurant with friends and your meal costs £1. If there are two of you that's 120 pennies each, three of you 80 pennies, four of you 60 pennies, five of you 48 pennies, six of you 40 pennies, seven of you - oops, you have a remainder. But after that we're good again all the way up to 12. But if a pound is 100 pennies, your factors are two and five and ten.
That principle applies all over the place. Standard good, chosen standard bad.
But a mad adherence to standards isn't good either. As Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Lets look at the world of computer hardware. It was a happy place with bits and bytes and nibbles and a kilobyte was 1024 bytes which made sense to anybody who actually worked with these things. Then the fucking Standards Institute hooked up with the marketing people (who realised that they could sell less for more if they changed 1024 to 1000) and thus was born the fucking abomination that is SI units for disk space, etc. Every actual fucking old school engineer like me carried on with the
established standard meaning we used powers of two because that's what we were actually using and that's what the words meant to everybody in the field. The only people who were confused by the old standard were the people who didn't need to use it. But now we had a fracture with everybody outside it and a new generation of graduate midwits who liked to say "actually that's a mebibyte" driving me mad.
So short version of all this, metric is better in that it's an actual standard but it is sometimes over-applied and it wasn't the best standard that could be picked. Imperial has functional advantages but needs serious refactoring and consistency between regions. Right now it's Americans in their own little world able to go "fuck you" to the rest of the world over it because they choose to divert all their money into bombs and tanks rather than education and infrastructure. It's a choice, I guess.
Imperial has a bunch of units that evolved based on what was useful to humans to serve a particular human purpose.
100000 centimeters in a kilometer may be easier to remember than 63360 inches in a mile, but there is literally zero use-case for this conversion factor. Inches were not developed to measure things scaled in miles and miles were not developed to measure things scales in inches. You do not use one for the the other and it is unlikely you would need to remember the conversion between them.
In some future when humans have colonized another planet, they're still going to have feet right there located at the ends of their legs. They're not going to have one 10 millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator on a line passing through Paris, France. That is an extremely arbitrary and unhelpful basis for a system of measurement.
If you wanted to be fun and fancy, you develop a system of measurements motivated by making as many fundamental physical constants as possible be numbers that play nice. 1, ideally. Maybe e or ln or phi for some special cases.
Yeah, from my own comments about megabytes, etc. I agree with some of what you say. But not to a degree that I would actually side with Imperial over Metric. The consistency is just too valuable. And for all the validity of what you say about inches vs. miles in the general case, there are far too many cases where you
do need to scale up and down, especially in software you're writing, to hand wave away the inconsistencies. I'm not going to use inches or miles or yards for anything internal in a system.
I might entertain Imperial as the contender if it weren't for fucking
cups. Every time I read an American recipe and they start talking about fucking cups I want to beat the crap out of somebody. Is it a measure of volume? Weight? "Yes" comes the meme reply. Consistent between substances? Oh, no! Different versions of cups between regions? Oh, absolutely. If you just wrote even Imperial measurements like fl. oz or oz. or something it would be at least something. But no - fucking "Cups". We're not trying on bras here! Sorry, stop using fucking cups and we'll talk.
