The war is ending though.

It will be over when we finally format code at read-time so that we respect the viewer's preferences, instead of at save-time to reflect the authors'.

Vertical spacing, ideally, reflects the thought process behind the construction of code: it's semantic.

Read-time revisions to spacing need, only, to change the non-intentional elements of spacing -- indent depth is a very good candidate for this (hence the tab character!).