I can assure you that in other countries there are standard altitudes, and they are flown.
I see you're from New Zealand/Australia. I confess I haven't seen an airspace map of Australia, but I suspect it looks rather different from an UK one.
I don't know if you'd be able to get hold of an UK VFR map for Southern England, but if you can then I suggest you try to plot a route from Redhill to Redhill, circumnavigating London, remaining clear of cloud and airspace, and staying high enough to satisfy the 'glide clear' rule. Then you'll appreciate why so few people here try to use them. Things are a little better away from London, but even then I rarely find myself able to follow the quadrantal rules for one reason or another.
the oddest and most disturbing thing about the British mentality is the way rank amateurs in all fields seem to think, as soon as they've reached a certain level, that they know more about the subject than everyone who've gone before them (especially the experts) and proceed to reinvent rules to suit themselves and then have the gall to justify this anarchy on the basis the "it seems more sensible to me", despite no more scientific knowledge or experience than the absolute minimum in the field.
I'm uncertain whether that's aimed at me. This is, it's true an American/UK attribute. There's an effect called the Dunning-Kruger effect that states that incompetent people are generally unaware of their incompetence:
http://roland.pri.ee/doktor/papers/U...psp7761121.pdf
However, when people have tried to replicate it in other more heirarchical societies, such as in Germany or Korea IIRC, they fail to find the effect or find that it is much weaker. The corollary of course is that it's a big problem if received wisdom from authority figures is never questioned.
I did some reading around before doing this 'study' and found that whilst there was unsurprisingly a lot of literature relating to preventing collisions between airliners, there wasn't a great deal on preventing collisions between GA flying VFR. That may well be simply because I couldn't find it because it was swamped in the commercial stuff, or possibly because it dated back to WWII and hasn't been digitised yet.
Incidentally, I have a PhD, albeit not in a field obviously related to aviation. I am aware that I'm outside of home turf, but I as far as I'm aware my finding (that asked to pick a random altitude within a given range, over 25% of people choose the same one) is both original and pertinent to discussion about whether standard or randomly chosen cruising levels are effective. I did it for fun, and within the constraints of the resources available to me I think I managed to be reasonably diligent. I don't take my result too seriously and I'm open to suggestions as to how my results might be interpreted differently, or how my methodology might have been improved.
You, on the other hand, haven't contributed anything constructive, merely pointing out that unspecified authority figures might differ, presumably on the basis of unreferenced evidence.