This is certainly true, that it aims to improve code readability and make code more consistent. 
However, you don't need to write "pep8 perfect" code to pass in Jenkins. That's the case for [socorro-crashstats](https://github.com/mozilla/socorro-crashstats) but not for socorro. 

However, equally important as pep8 is pyflakes. It's a script that checks that variables aren't defined but not used, or modules imported but never used and things like that. 

I manage both PEP8 and PyFlakes by running [check.py](https://github.com/jbalogh/check) which I install like this:
```
pip install -e git+https://github.com/jbalogh/check.git#egg=check
```