Personally I havn't been able to figure out what the technical advantages of the ring mains could be, compared to two 16 A radials. Granted, voltage drop is slightly lower, but other than that the ring mains actually uses more copper wire than two 16 A radials because the ring has to be completed somewhere. The available power at any given socket is the same, especially since each single socket is limited to 13 A by the plug. All you can save is one MCB.
On the other hand I can understand why the old ways of doing it don't go away easily. For example, if I use conduit I still have a black L1 rather than brown, because that's the way it's been done for the past 40 years and everybody still does it. There's no force to change it either, as both the Austrian and the German regs only state that phases must not be yellow/green, yellow or green. Blue is acceptable if there is no neutral present.
