I can explain this very easily for you: the reason why it is so popular is because the broken bits are offset by a huge margin by the nice bits, But frankly what is baffling is that there apperently there are still huge tribes hung up on the whitespace thing. Just accept that you have less freedom with the formatting, don't do tabs and watch out for the few gotcha's that can happen. For the rest all the complaints about it are complete non-issues, bit like complaining that there is no proper way to put a saddle on a car.