Excellent post, @LSLGuy, and you make a number of good points. Just one nitpick on this point, which I’m probably misunderstanding, but to my reading this sounds backwards. As one moves west across the continent, solar time of course gets progressively earlier, and eventually one pops into a new time zone where clock time is one hour earlier than in the more easterly one. So I’d phrase it as “the farther west you are within a single time zone, the earlier the “true” (solar) time, and therefore the later the clock is compared to the sun”.
For instance, over in this thread where I try to make the case for year-round Standard Time (not Daylight Time) I calculated that where I live, on the last day of Standard Time solar noon occurred at 12:19 PM clock time. That’s because the eastern time zone is huge and I’m a fair bit west of the center line, so the clock is a bit later than solar time.* My argument there is that when we switched to Daylight Saving Time, solar noon now occurs at 1:19 PM, which is quite a discrepancy from what the sun is actually doing. I must admit, though, that this argument largely relies on the premise that clock time and solar time should be reasonably aligned.
As for the reasons for the preference for year-round Daylight time, I suspect that a lot of it comes from the reasons that we have Daylight time in the first place, one of which is people’s general preference for more daylight at the end of the day for leisure activities. To the extent that there’s a political angle to this, it’s been suggested that longer daylight hours at the end of the day encourages people to be out shopping and dining, providing a commercial benefit. Another reason Daylight time was introduced was allegedly for energy savings, but I think it’s generally acknowledged that very little was achieved in that regard, and today probably even less because of energy-efficient lighting and appliances.
* Assuming that the eastern time zone is actually aligned with true solar time somewhere around its east-west geographic mid-point, which may not precisely be the case.