Basing it off UTC+01:00 instead of UTC was an extremely silly decision. The idea was never likely to take off to begin with, but for me that caused me to not even take it seriously.

Yes the prime meridian is somewhat arbitrary and a historical legacy of British imperialism-but replacing it with something just as arbitrary-but also idiosyncratic-is even worse.

The current system has the advantage that the international dateline goes through a relatively unpopulated region of the Pacific Ocean. I’ve thought before the longitudinal midpoint of the Afro-Eurasian landmass might be a less arbitrary (albeit still Old World-centric) prime meridian-but it would put the international dateline in a less convenient spot. And the costs of changing outweigh any possible benefit

This is great, I've always wanted some kind of local solar time. Like the old days when a town would set their clock tower to noon when the sun was highest. Apparently, the main push to coordinate was the train scheduling.