Not forgetting that voltage switching using DC is a royal pain in the butt.
Historically, the easiest way to do so was actually to covert DC to AC and then convert that AC to the desired DC voltage.
And this is important, because one of the things that makes grid power practical is the high-tension power lines that carry the stuff from the power plant to your neighbourhood. If the grid is AC anyway, it's comparatively simple to run an AC-AC transformer to step the voltage up to transmission voltage and then back down again at the other end, without having to worry about who's going to babysit the M-G sets you would have needed floating around all over the shop for a DC backbone.
Not forgetting that voltage switching using DC is a royal pain in the butt.
Historically, the easiest way to do so was actually to covert DC to AC and then convert that AC to the desired DC voltage.
And this is important, because one of the things that makes grid power practical is the high-tension power lines that carry the stuff from the power plant to your neighbourhood. If the grid is AC anyway, it's comparatively simple to run an AC-AC transformer to step the voltage up to transmission voltage and then back down again at the other end, without having to worry about who's going to babysit the M-G sets you would have needed floating around all over the shop for a DC backbone.