I agree with your argument.

My hesitation is a real-life counterexample. On a 3-4 month coffeescript project, we didn't have a styleguide, but did tend to favor "readability", and skipping parens often. The code in aggregate is just so much "lighter" that it ends up being more readable. I often use it as an example of one of the best looking codebase I've seen, and it turned me around on coffeescript (only so far as acceptance).  In your above examples , we'd just futz around until the code was clear, and to be honest, there wasn't any debate about CS style. We were pairing so it was worked out between pairs, and not in a global space like we're doing here. 

Although it's interesting to talk about it, I'd say we should just reduce strictness of the rules. Or simply step back and frame the whole document as "We aim to write as readable code as possible, and this document provides some good guidelines." Then we can spend less time customizing.