The time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun is not an integer multiple of the time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis, nor is it a rational number with a small denominator. Why should it be? Much of the complexity of our calendar can be explained by rational approximations to an irrational number.
Rational approximation
The ratio is of course approximately 365. A better approximation is 365.25, but that’s not right either. A still better approximation would be 365.2422.
A slightly less accurate, but more convenient, approximation is 365.2425. Why is that more convenient? Because 0.2425 = 97/400, and 400 is a convenient number to work with.
A calendar based on a year consisting of an average of 365.2425 days would have a 365 days most years, with 97 out of 400 years having 365 days.
In order to spread 97 longer years among the cycle of 400 years, you could insert an extra day every four years, but make three exceptions, such as years that are divisible by 100 but not by 400. That’s the Gregorian calendar that we use.
It’s predecessor, the Julian calendar, had an average year of 365.25 days, which was good enough for a while, but the errors began to accumulate to the point that the seasons were drifting noticeably with respect to the calendar.
Not much room for improvement
It would be possible to create a calendar with an even more accurate average year length, but at the cost of more complexity. Even so, such a calendar wouldn’t be much more accurate. After all, even the number we’ve been trying to approximate, 365.2422 isn’t entirely accurate.
The ratio of the time of the earth’s orbit to the time of its rotation isn’t even entirely constant. The Gregorian calendar is off by about 1 day in 3030 years, but the length of the year varies by about 1 day in 7700 years.
I don’t know how accurately the length of the solar year was known when the Gregorian calendar was designed over four centuries ago. Maybe the error in the calendar was less than the uncertainty in the length of the solar year.
Days of the week
Four centuries of the Gregorian calendar contain 146097 days, which is a multiple of 7. This seems to be a happy coincidence. There was no discussion of weeks in derivation above.
The implicit optimization criteria in the design of the calendar were minimizing the discrepancy between the lengths of the average calendar year and the solar year, minimizing the length of the calendar cycle, and using a cycle length that is a round number. It’s plausible that there was no design goal of making the calendar cycle an integer number of weeks.
Related post: Calendars and Continued Fractions