Maybe you haven't looked very often but nice code is out there for quite some time. Take a look at anything related to the GNOME stack (GLib, GTK+, all the applications) or the Linux kernel for example. And quite frankly, I stumble upon badly written Python way more often than C.
It's been part of email and newsgroup etiquette for ages now. Same goes for the quote blocks. So, why change something that is working for a lot of people in different domains?