alt Hacker NewsIt's an interesting tiny trade-off.
Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.
Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.
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You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.
Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.
Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.
Many, many people want to double or halve documents.
Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.
I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).
I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.