You're welcome to not use hex. For either addressing scheme.

Computers use binary. Hex is a human convenience. For anyone in computers hex is much better than decimal for obvious reasons. For anybody not in computers hex makes no sense and I'd need weeks of math lectures (which they wouldn't do the homework for and thus fail) to explain it.

Honestly IPv4 addresses should always have been formatted in hex, like FF 00 00 69, with whatever delimiter. Would make it trivial to write directly as a 32-bit int, and parsing and formatting a string would also be cheaper. And you could have funny blocks like CAFE.0.0.