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The consequent use of elegant selectors? Negative report.
The motive of the authors of the css to present a clear and lean set of rules? Negativ report.
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Well, I can tell you, from a commercial bookmaker's perspective, that many books--the vast bulk of which are deliberately made in ePUB to be subsequently converted with KindleGen for Amazon--will not use "elegant selectors," because there are millions--MILLIONS--of e-ink Kindles out there that will not recognize them. For that matter, Padawan Learner, there are millions of Nooks out there that won't recognize many "elegant selectors," either.
So, while "elegant selectors" and other specific sets of CSS that you've seemed to latch onto as "right," versus less exotic CSS that you seem to have decided is not, might give you joy, they bring no joy to people who labor for hours to make books, only to have reports back that "such and such" doesn't work on Nook, or Sony, or Kobo, or {insert device name here}. And the increasing amount of reader-control that is given over to the human readers, like in many, many iPad-based and Droid-based reading apps, means that it's LESS likely that "elegant selectors," et al, will ever be used again, because increasingly, users simply override them, and bitch and complain that someone "forced" a heading font on them.
And frankly, some of your "shoulds" versus your "should nots" are not formed from a genuine understanding of XHTML and ePUB standards. You
should spend more time making some ebooks from scratch, and trying them on myriad devices, before deciding that a span for X is wrong, versus not using one is right. I would cringe to have many of our epubs or books looked at by "experts" here on MR, because they might decry that we'd done such-and-such, which should "not" be done, but maybe we did it because the client expressly
needed something for Kobo, or for Nook, or even Sony. So, seriously, you
should try some distribution, and using books commercially, before you decide that what another bookmaker has done is garbage. Trust me, I've SEEN a lot of "commercial garbage," much of it using Calibre style tags, (or Indesign tags) and most of what you've listed
doesn't come close to describing some of the "bad" I've seen.
Hell, where's our resident curmudgeon, Wolfie? He's got a list of truly dreadful CSS and styling from a book--I forget where he got it--but THAT is truly awful, no matter WHAT the desired outcome or result or vendor would be.
Try making and distributing some books, before you decide the "shoulds" and "should nots." That's a whole different mile in someone else's shoes. As it happens, my firm does not do a lot of your "should nots," but that doesn't mean that the "should nots" are all wrong. Many are simply preference.
Part of the true beauty of HTML and CSS is that it is not all the same; much of it is highly personalized, and
subject to its own elegance in that regard. What you want will actually
suck all the joy OUT of the making of books.
And, no: there's no magic bullet. Just like there's no magic bullet to making a book, there's no magic bullet to "fixing it." Spend $40 and buy RegexBuddy, and learn how to remake the books as you want them using Regex. Regex is your friend.
Hitch