I understand why some people want more light in the morning. I understand why some people want more light in the evening. I don't understand why anyone would care when solar noon is.
Because it's the traditional marker for midday. You said yourself that different people want light at different times of day, so trying to accommodate people's needs like that will always fail someone. Why not skew as close to traditional time as feasible, if all we need to do is agree on one standard?
You seem to assume people's preferences are monotonic and average to solar time. Most people want more light in the evening. And most people say light before or after work is better than neither.
My assumption is that individual people's preferences are an insignificantly small data point compared to thousands of years of solar-based time schemes that our ancestors seemed to get by just fine with.
