A furlong is the distance a horse can plow in one day. This also gives a relationship between horsepower and furlongs. A chain is the distance you keep crops apart, and one chain by one furlong is an acre.
If you had 20 acres of land, you knew a horse could plow the land in 20 days.
The aging English system of Feet, Yards, Furlongs, Miles, Rods, Chains, Acres, Horsepower... they don't mean anything to non-farmers. So, we can replace these with a different system: the Metric system.
However, everyone uses the Point / Pica (1/72th an inch, and 1/6th an inch respectively) system for font measurement. As we are computer literate people today, font-size measured in "points" is quite important.
12-Point font (aka, font one pica in size) is a standard font size. No one cares that 12-points is really 4.233 mm. Hell, saying 4.233mm font means nothing to me.
But the day, night, moon, and sun cycles (approximated by day, month and year) is obvious to everyone. As such, an arbitrary 10-base system like Metric Time ignores the "reality" for most people... that the day, moon, and sun are related.
They would certainly never dream of using it for anything other than choosing how large they wanted their font, or possibly line.
The question then is, should we synchronize on the year, or on the day? The advantage of using the year is that it's a more stable unit of time; the length of a day is actually incredibly noisy and days are slowly getting longer every century as the Sun's and Moon's tidal forces deform the Earth, turning rotational energy into heat.
Unfortunately, there are a bunch of disadvantages. There are a lot of calendars in effect today, and they don't always settle on the same definition of "year" -- for that matter, there are a lot of astronomical definitions of "year" -- since the Earth's axis doesn't point at the same stars eternally, do you mean orbiting the Sun once relative to the distant stars (ignoring the axis) or do you mean coming back to the same tilt relative to the Sun so we can start the seasons over again (including the axis)? Or do you just mean a full cycle of phases of the moon, as lunar calendars do it?
The best way that I can see is to settle approximately on a day with an atomic clock; and push the question of actually trying to keep dawn at the same time each day (correcting for the slowdown of the Earth) to the time zones, which already sometimes try that in the sense of Daylight Saving Time.
