Have you ever been annoyed by "20th century" actually referring to the 1900s? Well, it's a good analogy for the tedious things you deal with all the time when using 1-based arrays.

Consider a common array task like the .net IO.stream read method:

int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int length) 

Here is what I suggest you do to convince yourself 0-based arrays are better:

In each indexing style, write a BufferedStream class that supports reading. You may change the definition of the Read function (eg. use a lower bound instead of an offset) for the 1-based arrays. No need for anything fancy, just make it simple.

Now, which one of those implementations is simpler? Which one has +1 and -1 offsets sprinkled here and there? That's what I thought. In fact I would argue that the only cases where the indexing style doesn't matter is when you should have used something that wasn't an array, like a Set.