The last point is really important. Otherwise you'd have engineers and groups fighting over where to put curly braces, 2 space indents vs 4, whether tabs are OK

The last point is really important. Otherwise you'd have engineers and groups fighting over where to put curly braces, 2 space indents vs 4, whether tabs are OK, etc--none of which actually matters. This is probably the most insightful comment to come out of this discussion. The exact numbers aren't all that important, but having a consistent style (including line length limits - which I'm fairly sure no one will argue that there should not be a limit) and not checking in stylistic changes (or at a minimum, disentangling them from actual changes of substance) is important. The problem is, we as programmers obsess over details (especially the closer you get to the hardware). The key is to obsess over the correct details, or obsess once and move on.