A very interesting article! I am a firm believer in the serial (or Oxford) comma, but aside from that I lean more toward punctuation by ear -- at least in fiction. I make a special editing pass through every story I write specifically to weed out extraneous commas, since they seem to sprout like particularly pernicious weeds when I'm not paying attention and I hate the way they interrupt the flow of the narrative. (I sometimes punctuate the living daylights out of nonfiction, though, because dammit I want to be clear.)