I bet that during the initial design phase, they wanted to keep the design simple, have enough timekeeping range to cover the mission and then maximize temporal

I bet that during the initial design phase, they wanted to keep the design simple, have enough timekeeping range to cover the mission and then maximize temporal resolution. Someone realized that a counter operating on tenths of a second from 2000 was both easy to use and sufficient for the primary mission... they then thought nothing of it until the loss of contact