As a European having watched many house framer videos on Youtube, the imperial system of in/ft actually somehow makes sense there. As far math, it's pretty annoying, but as far as communicating ratios or dividing distances into halves or fourths, it seems like a better fit to the human brain.
Yeah, a lot of people really don't get how useful fractional measures can be for building and construction, or other tasks. You can do like 99% of the math required to build a residential home completely in your head, even if you aren't great at math to start with. You could even forgo a tape measure completely and build the house using a piece of wood with a mark to give a standard length and then doing all the rest with a piece of string you fold over for ratios of that length.
It even was really useful when I was making patterns and molds for industrial ceramics. Half the orders would be in metric, half would be in imperial, but was 90% of the time converted to imperial by everybody whenever possible despite knowing both systems because it was much faster to get work done using ratios of standard fractional sizes. Need more precision? Divide your unit in half how many times you needed.
