This is why decimal floating-point formats are kind of a disaster in general and are only implemented in relatively rare hardware intended for financial uses. In many of those applications, using a decimal fixed point representations is better – i.e. counting in millionths of pennies (you can still count up to ±9 trillion dollars with 64 bits). But yes, a technical comparison of different decimal formats would definitely be interesting. I suspect that despite the occasional failure of intuitiveness, we're far better off with binary formats and better programmer education.