Do we really have fun talking about dull formatting matters? Why do programmers go over this s-o m-a-n-y t-i-m-e-s? I could understand it if the responses were over the top ("As Pope John Paul suggests, tabs are clearly evil.") But they're not -- same old stuff, dragged out interminably.
Is it because it doesn't really mean anything that people argue about this, as if it's not something a formatter or good editor couldn't deal with in its sleep? It's like it became necessary to not only defend your favorite color, but also convince everyone else that your color is also the best.
(And why should I care? Dumb dumb dumb.)
That's something that came up on p5ee while it was changing from a potentially interesting effort to something bogged down in committee talk (I don't know much of what happened afterwards).
To summarize: when there's an important thing to be discussed, people assume that others are competent and are afraid of looking silly discussing something they're not confident they fully grok. Whent it's something that anyone can have an opinion on -- such as the colour of a multinationational's bike shed -- they want to make sure that their voice is heard.
Thankfully, such traits of mankind have led us to invent beer, which wasn't such a bad idea
