Honestly I don't see the huge advantage in this coding standard of 80 character lines. It really just makes the code uglier.

I mean look at some of the stuff the autoformatter did -- it basically made readable function calls look.. strange.. all just to strangle them into fitting on an 80 char line. I question the wisdom of making easily readable code look bizarre in favor of 80 characters. I don't think it's a wise tradeoff to make and .. aesthetically it's displeasing.

I had similar issues with my C++ code on one of the diffs I submitted. You basically didn't like it because the autoformatter was unhappy.

I say: We can and should intelligently ignore the autoformatter when we want to, and rather just use it as a reminder we are free to ignore.

In this diff there are tons of places where the lines it formtted look a lot worse and less readable than what was originally there.

Do we have to do this?

I suggest you read this paragraph from the Pep8 style guide:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds

Basically even the Pep8 style guide authors acknowledge blindly following a style guide is not always wise, and you should use your best judgement.