As an American, I personally hate that standard, and usually use YYYY-MM-DD wherever possible, and only revert to MM-DD-YY on documents that require it in that format. I get that MM-DD follows the conventions of speech ("the event is on May 7th"), but it's really ambiguous when written in all numbers.
Unfortunately, that's just not the way people talk about dates here. Maybe it's because we use a backward date order, or maybe it's a self-reinforcing loop, but that just doesn't sound natural, even to me.
