Nate, you cite GD&T as contributing to a multi-billion dollar
industry. I respect it as such. I also respect video gaming and film
animation as multi-billion dollar industries; but I wouldn't use
their models of Newton's laws of motion as the basis of landing a
rocket on Mars. It's horses for courses.
Nate, you point out mid-rad can save memory, hence bandwidth, on
large interval calculations. But the saving is always less than 50%,
ne c'est pas? because one has to store the "mid" value to full
precision. If you had a method that saves an order or two of
magnitude, it would be more convincing. But that usually comes from
an improved algorithm.