*AND* I have an explanation for every guide I follow

This is the compelling statement for me. I'm sure most of the (in my view) nasty coding practices prevalent now are simply because "that's the way I was taught" or, even worse, "I never thought about it".

My primary guide is "format it like prose" - which speaks mostly to horizontal white space usage and use of blank lines to group blocks of related lines (paragraphs). A secondary guide is that stuff at the start of a line is much more important than stuff at the end of a line - which speaks to how "long" lines get wrapped and to what constitutes "long".

I use K&R for Perl because "everyone" does, but I can't think of any justification for it. Elsewhere (mostly C++) I indent curlies to the same level as the rest of the block they are part of. My justification is that a curly wrapped block of statements is semantically the same as a single statement and should be indented the same. In my mind the curlies are part of the block so ...

Would anyone care to suggest why K&R is compelling?"