> US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial.
I don't know that I'd make this claim, in general. Everything from bikes to American cars can still be found with imperial nuts and bolts. Even the robotics work I did in school was mostly in imperial units due to the greater availability of, for example, 1/4" 6061 Aluminum stock.
People will stick to whatever system is most convenient for most tasks. It makes it difficult to escape local minima.
We've been "fully metric" here in Australia since the early '70's - I still find it amusing when seeing things like the building industries "standard sizing", where everything comes in 900mm increments and lumber all comes in sizes like "50 by 100mm nominal". Everything is still built out of 3, 6, and 12 foot two-by-fours and 3 by 6 foot 1/2 ply sheet - all labeled with metric dimensions of varying clarity.
When I worked at NASA, nothing was metric unless it came from overseas. Everything we built was imperial. I preferred it for a few reasons, one of which was that it's harder to make a decimal point error with imperial units.
I don't know that I'd make this claim, in general. Everything from bikes to American cars can still be found with imperial nuts and bolts. Even the robotics work I did in school was mostly in imperial units due to the greater availability of, for example, 1/4" 6061 Aluminum stock.
People will stick to whatever system is most convenient for most tasks. It makes it difficult to escape local minima.