This. Most definitely. In the 1600s everyone had to make his own instruments, and things we take for granted today, like accurate and precise rulers and tools, did not exist.
If you want an accurate and yet easy to carry thermometer, how on Earth are you going to divide the distance between two marks a few inches apart into 100 or 50 or 60 EXACTLY equal divisions? Without, remember, a precision ruler at hand? You can’t.
On the other hand, dividing it into 32 or 64 equal divisions by repeatedly dividing accurately in two is easy. The Greeks knew how to divide distances very precisely in half using compass, scribe, and straight edge, and you can do pretty well with just a taut string. You don’t need any precision measurement equipment, or tools.
As for the standard: Fahrenheit as a meteorologist probably already knew (and certainly those who adopted his scale widely later knew) that the boiling point of water varies significantly with weather, salinity and altitude, so as a practical standard for setting one end of the scale, it’s useless. (The freezing point of water varies considerably less, because neither of the phases involved, ice or liquid water, is compressible. You still have the problem of salinity, but the effect is also smaller, and, if you come up from below – melt ice – it can be eliminated anyway, since ice is nearly salt-free.)
Human body temperature has the virtue that it’s always at hand, it requires no equipment, and it doesn’t vary with the weather or altitude. It’s true it varies with individuals and even within an individual, but as long as you’re not acutely ill, not much more than a degree or two.
Finally, God knows why anyone thinks a division of 100 equal parts makes intrinsic sense. I can only think it’s a reflex carryover from the use of 100 equal parts in measurements of cost, length or mass, where you routinely multiply and divide such measurements, so as to calculate things like density, price per pound, area, volume, and so forth.
Now…can anyone think of ANY situation, other than using the ideal gas equation of state or calculating heat capacities (which isn’t a very day to day experience), where you would want to multiply or divide by a temperature? Of course not. Or can anyone think of a case from daily life where you might want to define a prefix, as “kilo-” gets usefully added to “grams” or “meters?” What use would we have in ordinary 17th (or even 21st) century life for kilodegrees or millidegrees?
The most important property of a temperature scale, when people first started measuring temperature, largely for the purposes of weather prediction – kind of *important * when 96% of the population makes its living by farming – is that it’s so straightforward, and requires so little equipment or training to implement, that even in an age when any instrument more precise than a piece of string or a balance scale cost a fortune and could only be made by master craftsmen in a major city, any yokel who could lay hands on the materials (glass, alcohol) could make one, calibrate it tolerably accurately, and understand how to communicate his results to others very clearly. (That last is a good reason to avoid negative numbers, given the level of math training then widespread. It’s not like everyone had taken 7th grade algebra.)
By that criterion Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit’s scale was brilliant, and incidentally superior to Anders Celsius’, which is why it is no accident that Fahrenheit’s scale dominated world industry and commerce for centuries.