it's embarrassing that we use such a fragile process to establish a standard that is supposed to be used everywhere.
The problem with this is it isn't even fragile, it's _not reproducible_. The worst part is that other SI units depend on the kilogram, so they all change as this drift occurs! After a certain amount of time, how will we know what a "real" kilogram is? See here for discussion of this SI problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Dependency_of_the_SI_...
The point of the watt balance approach is to make it possible for a lab to reproduce the kilogram without another kilogram reference. That's what this is about, and I don't really think it's embarrassing. I think it's very, very hard.
If you tried to use water ice as a standard, you'd find that its mass was changing all the time as the ice sublimated away, or humidity condensed onto its surface. It would be impossible to make precise measurements.
How do you measure a known quantity of water to within a few tens of parts per billion? Do you specify the proportion of light to heavy water? (For 'normal' water about 1 in 41 million.) What about contaminants in the water? There are so many uncertainties that it's impossible for all practical purposes.
The whole point of using 'rare' silicon is that we already have commercial processes for producing ultrapure, defectless, monocrystals of the stuff (for use in computer chips), so it's easy to reuse that technology for defining a kilogram.
Are you aware of all the matter exchange processes that are continuously going on at the surface of water ice under normal conditions?