It's pretty silly when people complain about different tastes in subjective areas, such as music, architecture, pronunciation, food or other cultural differences. However, when it comes to methods of technical communication such as time formats or measurement units the complaints have little to do with subjective preferences, and more to do with real world consequences of maintaining unintuitive systems. Technical language should be clear, precise and uniform. That's what it's for. Insisting on maintaining different standards causes real headaches for everyone who has to deal with those systems, and sometimes can cause catastrophic errors. It has little to do with preference, and much more to do with practicality.
It's okay if there are differences. Arab-speaking countries use RTL, which causes huge issues everywhere. We don't tell them to change their language, we just adapt to it. Software developers are not using M/D/Y anyway, and everyone else who deals with international business should already understand the difference. When I see a non-American date, I assume D/M/Y. It shouldn't be that hard to expect supposedly cosmopolitan Europeans to do the same.
> Software developers are not using M/D/Y anyway, and everyone else who deals with international business should already understand the difference
That's a pretty major assumption that does not jive with experience. Date formatting inconsistentices were the bane of my existence in my last role. Maintaining clean databases that has input streams that came from Canada, the US and Poland constantly caused problems. Yes the company had standards of how to properly do things. Were those standards followed? Not all the time. Especially when data sources came from 2nd and 3rd tier downstream suppliers. Did people try their best? Yeah, for the most part. But that doesn't prevent mistakes.
