As odd as they seem, Empirical units are very practical for the purposes which they served. They were quite useful to the people that used them, at the time they were used. If they weren't useful, they wouldn't have been used.
Actually, I agree with that. The metric system, on the other hand, was designed with universality in mind. It's quite easy to find an application where they are not ideal, but they can easily be translated back and forth between applications, and scales can be grasped more easily.
