There's no drawback if you're working alone. The rest of the community however, decided that spaces are the standard. Yes it's somewhat arbitrary (golang picked

There's no drawback if you're working alone. The rest of the community however, decided that spaces are the standard. Yes it's somewhat arbitrary (golang picked tabs for instance), but if you don't want to conform to the community coding standards, it only brings hardship upon yourself. A lot of python is convention based, and you can break all the rules you want and still have valid code, but no one else will want to use or maintain it.