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Lost me at the "correct placement of braces".

That's just a matter of personal taste (although I also have an opinion about that :) But this is not exactly what this post is about.

Everybody has an opion about that, thus Kirill's comment.

OTOH, if the writer actually made consistent use of curly braces, he wouldn't have to insert so many blank lines

When I have to go over code of my co-workers I often find myself inserting lots of empty lines (at the right places) to get a better overview.

Blank lines should only be used to group code, not format it. I hate when people put them in almost every second line, allegedly to increase readability. It has the opposite effect, you need to scan more lines, or worse scroll more than one screen. You write readable code by keeping it clean, elegant and small. If you need to resort to many blank lines, you already failed.

I agree, but what is regarded as a "group" of code? Some people think a method is a single group of code :-)

If your code isn't readable without inserting empty lines (or worse, lines with only an opening brace { ), then it's probably not an issue of formatting--perhaps it's a sign that you need to refactor such a lengthy segment? It's quite distracting when there's so much useless whitespace that I need to scroll unnecessarily. It's also very distracting (and dare I say, UGLY) to have an opening brace on a line by itself--I don't know any gifted or disciplined developers that still use that style. On the other hand, I agree that some horizontal white space is a very good thing.