Jefferson was responsible for US customary and got a lot of it working; the French were responsible for metric, but were interrupted by The Reign Of Terror.
Really? I struggle to see how dividing any number by two is easier than dividing it by ten, but would like to be enlightened. Divide by ten I just need to mentally move the decimal point, dividing numbers such as 35 or 123 by two requires a lot more mental arithmetic.
It's a snap to fold a piece of paper in half, thirds[0], quarters, sixths, eighths, (etc), but I'm not aware of a trick that lets you divide a sheet into tenths.
[0] Higher powers of three seem tricky too.
For example, how is "12 inches to a foot, 3 foot to a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile" base 2?
My understanding, before reading your post was that US customary was basically adapted from imperial which was in turn just an adaptation of folk measurements - a foot was about the length of a foot, etc.
How is dividing by 2 easier than moving the decimal point by 1 place?
Fold a piece of paper into 10 equal parts perfectly. Easy?
Yes, the USA uses inches and pounds and gallons. They also use m, g, and L. And picas and fingers and miles and decibles and watts and joules. Mostly they don't know or care. If they do know and care, they are usually capable of using whichever unit gets the job done.