It's not moronic there is good reasoning behind that standard.

Benefits of going big to small (for languages that read left-to-right):

• Lexicographical sort order is equal to chronological sort order
• It doesn't conflict with other commonly used date formats. If you see 01/02/2016 then that could mean two things, because dd/mm/yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy are commonly used, but yyyy-dd-mm is not commonly used so it is clear that the format is yyyy-mm-dd. Because Americans lean toward mm/dd/yyyy and many other countries lean toward dd/mm/yyyy many parts of the world end up somewhere in between because they are commonly exposed to both formats creating a lot of ambiguity.
• Consistent with basically ever other number format because big to small is the norm. For example time is always hour then minute. Digits in a number like 1234 go thousands, hundreds, tens, ones and never the other way around. When describing a distance you would use feet before inches. When displaying a decimal number you do the whole number part before the decimal part.
• Combines better with time since time is always big to small. If you do dd/mm/yyyy hh:MM:ss then the numbers aren't even in any consistent order at all, their sequence by significance is 4, 5, 6, 3, 2, 1.
• Better facilitates use with computer systems because yyyy-mm-dd is a favorable computer-readable format and still perfectly human readable.
• Even though you could argue that yyyy-mm-dd is not commonly used, I would argue that it is commonly understood. If I'm signing a document I use yyyy-mm-dd because I know the reader will figure it out but with other formats an error is more likely.