[flukus]

My experience is the opposite. When a project is tab indented and you have 1 guy indenting by 2 spaces and another by 4 the inconsistency is spotted pretty quickly, maybe this is what you're noticing?. When spaces are used it's easy for tabs to hide.

Also there's a lot of crappy editors that don't handle smart tabs well, including some big, expensive, proprietary IDE's.

[Glyptodon]

I'm guessing at least part of it is different smart tab behavior, but I've opened files to find chunks that were indented with double tabs (as in one indent level was done as two tabs) in the middle files that were otherwise single tab indented and even weirder stuff that I suspect is because of somebody indenting wrapped text.

(Yes, poor QC and Dev ops went along with it.)