I was specifically talking about your example of .473 liters of liquid. No one using the metric system primarily is going to be serving .473 liter glasses of beer. They're going to be serving half liters. Or 500 mills. Or 200 mills. It really isn't that hard or unintuitive. Likewise, they're going to build buildings using measurements that make sense in metric. The problem is you're taking measurements that work nicely internal to the base-2 and base-12 imperial system and asking why they don't work well in the base-10 metric system. Well yeah, they don't, especially when you start out by converting from an imperial unit.

I'll pose it another way. Quick, what is a tenth of a foot? A tenth of a gallon? Ten cups in gallons? Why is a fork so bad at eating tomato soup?