I maintain a library[1] that's pretty popular with the journalism crowd for converting Google Spreadsheets to JSON, and you're exactly right about the risk[2]. Google's been sitting on a bug for over 6 months now because API usage of Google Spreadsheets just isn't important enough to merit a fix[3].
We've sent people off into the caching world[4] to fit it on our end, but your criticism is unfortunately spot-on.
Tabletop creator here, thanks for mentioning it! It's funny - since my target audience was journalists I never ever ever thought of describing it as "getting JSON from Google Spreadsheets." Looks like it's time to update the ol' README.
The French actually beat Swatch by a a couple centuries - during the French Revolution they spent about twenty years fooling around with metric/decimal time. Ten hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, and 100 seconds per minute (each second ended up about 14% shorter than a "normal" second).
They real fun is in the calendar, with 12 months of 30 days each, and rules like "every tenth day is named after a mineral."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_...