If that is the case how does the difficulty adjust up and/or down only a few percentage points every 2 weeks?
Previous difficulty adjustment increased the difficulty by 4.38%, if this small of an adjustment is possible then why can't what I propose be done?
It is my understanding that originally the difficulty could only be adjusted by powers of 2 as you describe, but that was altered somehow at some point to allow the fractional adjustments we see today.