It's just a rite of passage that a newcomer to the field of computer programming must explore. In your words, "let's be blunt now."

• argue their unflagging, nee unflinching support for one side of a useless style standards discussion
• loudly expouse the virtues of their own code editor over all others, of which maybe a third of the useful features have been explored adequately
• rally for the adoption of an obvious workflow advantage such as using centralized source code repositories
• create and standardize on a new and smarter "string" class which only serves as a standard for one project

For me, if I have to use an editor which makes me even THINK about tabs versus spaces, I feel like a caveman eating mammoth meat off the bone. A good editor will just adapt for you, and adjust the indentation to each likely point of visual indentation for you, and save it with the appropriate encoding automatically. That's all it is: an application-specific encoding of whitespace, and therefore, an almost entirely uninteresting implementation detail.

And for that one guy who advocated them for the purposes of reduced file size, please go buy another 10MB winchester or bernoulli box down at Radio Shack before you tear the 1983 calendar off your wall.

Thanks for separating out the responses. It gave more voting exposure.