But, the grid square concept never has caught on for HF operation. Probably lots of reasons why. Like, maybe, it's too arbitrary and can't be lawyered.
Well, a lot of things.
First off, for HF, there are way too many grids. The CQ Organization has its "field" award, which is for the first two letters of the grid. Surprisingly, that turns out to be a workable challenge compared to fields. I've actually got fairly high achievement, mixed, in that one and even bothered to get credit for it.
In theory, you could work a lot of /MM on the CQ Field Award. In practice, I have found, most boats most of the time hug the shore, so it is harder than it looks to get "fields" that are purely water fields.
That leaves the relatively small amount of fields that have at least some land in them. They consider a score of around 172 or more fields to be a real good achievement. And, in fact, it is.
Still, most of you are probably starting to fall asleep, because you don't care.
Why, old fashioned Worked All States is almost certainly far more popular than the CQ Field Award. WAZ, another non-political division of the world, is reasonably popular, but not as popular as DXCC and maybe less popular even than WAS, at least when it comes to actual applications.
I suspect that, a bit counter-intuitively, we humans actually prefer to divide the world up into "political" entities, maybe
because of rather than
despite the headaches it can cause. Something about a grid or a field is maybe kind of cold blooded in the end.
Grids work for VHF simply because, on balance, the range is shorter and therefore the disparity between stations is far greater than it is for DXCC on HF. So, grids caught on there. But I know a lot of field chasers who
also diligently chase DXCCs, even in places where it is far easier to make HF Honor Roll than a basic 6m DXCC.