alt Hacker NewsThe slight of hand in standard Western European music theory is that stacking 5ths gives you Lydian and its tritone as the foundational seven pitch scale. Major/Ionian is the fourth mode of this scale.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…except when it comes to science as a basis for an argument from authority.
Like all music, people like what they like.
For that matter, the first 5 stacked fifths gives you the standard pentatonic scale. Extending by a fifth on either end and you get the most common accidentals in Western music (if your first seven give C major you’ll get F# and B♭). I think (but I’m not sure) that some of the non-Western microtonal scales extend the tonality by not ignoring the Pythagorean comma when you’ve done the 12th fifth, but by continuing to stack fifths for more harmonies.