We already have several time options without leap seconds, such as International Atomic Time [1] and GPS Time [2]?
Why can't people who want to avoid leap seconds just use those?
If we switch to leap-minutes or leap-hours they'll be rare enough that software bugs won't get exposed enough to get fixed - it'll be like Y2K every time.
Both TAI and GPS time are offset from UTC by a noticeable amount, so switching to one of them would produce a large disruption, especially given that it would have to be done incrementally. Also, many people feel legally compelled to use UTC, so the only solution for them is to legally redefine UTC to have no additional leap seconds added in the future.
I wouldn't bother with leap minutes or hours either; instead we could just adjust timezones to create a virtual leap hour. It would effectively be a permanent version of daylight savings time (assuming that such a concept exists in 2,000 years).
Why can't we use a sensible (moving forwards at a constant pace) time as a default for everyone, and have those rare astronomical systems use some special time options?
By the time leap minutes will be a serious issue many humans will be living on planets other than Earth. Leap seconds are absolutely the wrong solution to the problem of trying to translate between some sort of absolute time and local time.
Why can't people who want to avoid leap seconds just use those?
If we switch to leap-minutes or leap-hours they'll be rare enough that software bugs won't get exposed enough to get fixed - it'll be like Y2K every time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping