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While many so called 'imperial' measurements are based on historical (and perfectly reasonable) reasoning I am firmly in the camp of those who believe the decimal system - metric if you will - is the best option we have.
I too was brought up in the era of £sd (settle down hippies) and was involved, being a banker at the time, in the change over in this country to dollars and cents. That of course was only the currency side of things. We also had to go through the phases of changing from pounds and stones to Kilogrammes and grammes; gallons (imperial) to litres and so on and so forth.
Oddly enough I made a comment during a discussion on the same subject just a few days ago on another (but non-astronomy) site. Perhaps it has become for some reason a general debate?
Surely I still sometimes think in my old terms - particularly when it comes to someone's height - but, at the same time, I am more than happy to work in millimetres when it comes to measuring out pieces of timber or metal. In those cases I have overcome the need to convert the metric measurements 'back' to imperial. By the same token, if someone quotes me a measurement in centimetres I automatically convert it to mm.
I think the crux of any conversion is not the actual change over, it's just the matter of changing one's thinking and ignoring the mental gymnastics involved in attempting to relate the 'new' measurements to the 'old'.
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