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Logarithmic scales make sense for things with clear, quantifiable measures in some particular dimension. This scale both includes a large number of qualitative measures that aren't particularly obviously different orders of magnitude and conflates severity of effect and time to fix.

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I'd love for systems theory (cybernetics or whatever) to have gotten to the point where we could have an actual measure of disruption. Severity seems to come from both what the outage is, and also from our failure to build resilient systems... it's earthquake tremors vs whether we followed the building codes. But unlike earthquakes, it's really hard to tease those two apart

There's one like what you say: Mercali.

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