Maybe you are not familiar with what the N in NTP stands for?
Network Time != System Time
(although they should be very close, even maybe same, depending on refresh interval, etc…)
I read a tremendous amount (as I always do) before even posting the question. There is nothing whatsoever in the NTP documentation explicitly stating that the concept of “System Time” is not exposed in any way and that is why the NTP binding was created. And while perhaps a valid inference on your part, that is what it is, an inference.
At any rate, I suppose I am just a bit surprised that this is not directly exposed in any way. Closest I think I found (and I’m not even sure about that) was back in this old thread which was about then (Oct 2018) future roadmap for OpenHAB.
Other than that, I think the only way to actually get the system time would be to do something like what @rossko57 suggested above. But wow, what a hack! Running a cron every minute (or more! if you want accurate granularity…). What an unnecessary load on the system, IMO…
So, last night, I made choice to try the ntp binding, but I could not get it to work. I just un-installed it and gave up, but maybe instead I should make a separate thread about that and try and figure out what happened.