Daylight Savings Time Rumination

Does anybody really know what time it is? The farmers near where I grew up hated the time leaps. They kept their milking cows on the same schedule, but the relative time changed. If the morning milking was at 7 am the summer “half” of the year, it became 6 am in the “winter” time. What really confuses me is how the U.S. Congress came up with the dates. The dates are not equal distance from the solstices. The 2016 winter solstice was Dec 21; Daylight Savings Time (DST) ended Nov 6, 2016, and began again March 12, 2016. There were 45 days between the ending of DST and the winter solstice. There were 81 days between the winter solstice and today’s beginning of DST. To confuse matters even more, the sun set at 5:47 pm in NYC on the last evening of DST in 2016 then jumped to 4:46 pm the first day of standard time. The sun will set at 6:59 pm tonight (first evening of DST) and last night was 5:58 pm. Where is the science that shows that shows that these times make sense? How was it determined that the days and sunset times needed to be different for the beginning and ending of DST? Show me the science!