> One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps.
...which would be indeed useful if your country and its neighbors are on the opposite side of the Earth from the Pacific. If your country and most of its important trade partners are sitting right around the Pacific, the "strength" is now shortcoming.
Frankly, I didn't know so many people would claim that a world map centered around Europe has some inherent virtue, instead of being the result of local convenience (nothing wrong with that). This is the same kind of feel-good story as "Fahrenheit is superior because 0 and 100 are at human level."
I live in Australia, and having a map that centres on the Pacific so that Chile is in relation to us... is not very useful. Our political, social, cultural, and economic ties have very little to do with South America. The Pacific Ocean almost literally takes up half the planet. A general-purpose map can benefit from diminishing its importance (after all, are the seas ever any other colour than a simple plain light blue on these?). The benefit of a Euro/Afrocentric map is that the split goes down the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and there's only a couple of countries there, whose tiny islands are rarely shown on maps anyway.
This equal-area map dramatically distorts the shapes of the landmasses, and they're the very thing the map is there to show. Brazil is pregnant; Australia has a tumour; China is smaller than Australia, instead of being 25% larger; Saudi Arabia is as big as India; so on and so forth. The projection lines on the map do not match up with how humans see things - this is not a map for humans to use, since the only way to make sense of it in a practical way is to interpret it with a tool.
...which would be indeed useful if your country and its neighbors are on the opposite side of the Earth from the Pacific. If your country and most of its important trade partners are sitting right around the Pacific, the "strength" is now shortcoming.
Frankly, I didn't know so many people would claim that a world map centered around Europe has some inherent virtue, instead of being the result of local convenience (nothing wrong with that). This is the same kind of feel-good story as "Fahrenheit is superior because 0 and 100 are at human level."