ChrisD

A well thought out personal essay of altimeters as many currently understand things work. I appreciate your efforts, However: " It really boils down to three things: familiarity, specific application, and personal preference."
This is not how our brain works. Research has clearly shown, Posner, Donovan, etc., and including Research done in the seventies that I personally participated in for the DOD, NASA, etc., has consistently shown that pictorial displays "capture your attention,... in stress inducing situations,... significantly more readily than numerical, audible, or text driven information."
The key word here is "Significantly." See Posner attention capture research for a more thorough and complete explanation.
This has nothing to do with "personal preference," or the application or your familiarity with the display! And to make this jump in logic is doing a great disservice to skydivers worldwide.
Very rarely in science do we get such strong evidence that our brains process visual pictures and that that same information can capture our attention more readily than text displays.
I also look forward to the day that your altimeters, the electronic displays, can present a colorful pictorial display, with more attention capabilities, (Think blinking bright red, at a display level above ambient ,...) and then perhaps switching to a more accurate numerical display for the landing pattern, as a possible idea.
BUT until then,... in an emergency situation, numerical displays are at a significant disadvantage as compared with pictorial information.

A painful reminder of the blind trust we place in our aircraft,...? Overloaded, poor maintenance, and or a very poor performing aircraft in the first place? So the real question is why do we as skydivers place so much blind trust in others and their judgment that just because something that we have gotten away with more than a few times means it is an acceptable for the future? Light twins and overloaded Cessna's have been and continue to be the bane of the aircraft used in skydiving amounting to the overwhelming population of fatal incidents. You can chose to ignore this because "some" have gotten away with it and continue to do so or you can educate yourself and rise above this ignorance and in the process quite possibly save your ass someday! Using a light twin for jump operations is and HAS BEEN WELL KNOWN FOR YEARS to be a problem child. Personally, I have refused more than one occasion to jump from them. Their performance has and ALWAYS HAS BEEN marginal and their use for jump operations has always been questionable. You might want to consider this before you get into an aircraft with such poor performance as compared with more suitable and popular aircraft. And this is well before anything goes wrong!!! The same continues to go for all of those Cessna drop zones that continue to operate their aircraft: at or near gross, YOU just don't have any safety margin, something to consider,...for those of you out their that are a little more proactive when it comes to safety.