Ah so the complaint is of moving the last order of magnitude onto the quantity rather than the unit. I can't imagine this affects readability that much (although I can understand why you'd want to enforce consistency in an academic context).
Sometimes it's useful to distinguish these, though. And after many do have the inexplicable "MM" suffix (ie s thousand-thousand) to suffer through which seems much worse.
For the uninitiated, what's confusing about this? It seems to communicate the intended meaning accurately. Is there some ambiguity here I missed?