> I don't see how "boring" is an issue here. If the whole thing has a goal of functionality, why do I care if it's boring?

Exactly. Or actually, to go even further: On the contrary, "boring" may well be an issue, but in the sense that that's what we want. When you write code -- or prose, marketing copy, poetry, whatever -- what you want to concentrate on is the content of your text, not the esthetic of the letterforms. "Boring" is the opposite of "captures your attention", and if I want to focus my attention on the meaning of groups of letters, "boring" -- not grabbing my attention -- is exactly what I want the shapes of the letters themselves to be.

And yes, I want them all to be the same width, so I can line up repetitive bits of code (or poetry?) below each other and match -- catch -- the non-repetitive bits at a glance. (Sorry, we can't all write in bone-DRY functional languages; SQL is pretty damn verbose and often, yes, repetitive.) IMO that's part of the content I want to focus on.