The math is not done in ones head but using a plotter on a chart. As long as latitude is defined as it is, nautical miles have meaning.
If you're using a plotter, then actual length is presumably irrelevant - any unit would do, yes?
I was not asserting that nautical miles don't have meaning - just that their meaning is even more arbitrary than most other units of measurement, except in this case they're extra useless because they align to what they ostensibly derive from only at or near the equator.
If you want to use something 'around that size', and you're very keen on avoiding metric at all costs, then why not just use the 'upstream' unit - a minute? Obviously it still suffers from converging meridians if you measure from a plane through the sphere, but I'm not sure what number of measurement problems you're happy to contend with.
The coordinate grid may be arbitrary (though having a lot of factors is nice), but the derived nautical mile is not.
Yes. We may be misunderstanding each other.
It's convenient to have nautical miles per hour if you're using a base unit of nautical miles, and your map grid is nautical miles based. This isn't a surprise at all.
Estimating wind, tides, drift, etc, would be equally as easy if everyone was working in kilometres, and your maps were showing grids based on multiples-of-kilometres, and all speeds were given in kilometres per hour. Again, wouldn't be a surprise.