The "problem" with PEP 8 is that it treads on areas of personal preference that are subject to quite high amounts of emotion for most programmers.
For me personally, camelCase vs underscores and column alignment directives were constant issues. I also see point in lots of other responses here and sometimes I break PEP 8 intentionally because in that particular case it just "makes sense".
There was a point in my Python programming career when I simply gave up and turned to (using) PEP 8. It was relatively easy for most items, so nowadays the only major issue I still have is the column alignment. That one's just too messy to obey(though I hatefully do anyway). Anyway, as a result of my "giving up", my code is now much more readable to my colleagues - and - surprisingly: even to me (except for the column alignment thingy :p ).
I must also recognize what PEP 8 has done for python itself: between 2.x (non-compliant) and 3.x (compliant), I find it much easier to "always know" what a particular function's name will be. Python's "batteries" are sorted much nicer now.
