Rules are Made to be Left Up to Style

It drives me nuts that we have unbreakable rules for such small things like:

• west as a direction, but West as a location
• If you want to shorten a word it's 'em and not 'em (of course no curly quotes here)
• How to properly use ellipsis 
• Three different types of dashes 

But when it comes to the bigger things like capitalization and when you want to use commas, errors in writing become "the author's style."