Sounds cumbersome because you're not used to it.
One of the benefits of being balanced is that it's self-rounding: Just turn any amount of final digits into 0s and you're done. What if you want to express the exact half, decimal 0.5? Well you'll end up with either 1.TTTTT... or 0.11111... so it could round either way. If we were to use this system, shops could no longer manipulate us with prices ending in .99.
Give it a minute to fully grasp the concept and you'll see how intuitive it is.