[Ken Case]

Sorry, it sounds like some shared personal (but not company) philosophy got mixed up in the help there.

The real reason we don't allow individual styles on rows is because there are already a confusing number of combined styles being applied to each row, and each time we add another style dimension (bold/italic/purple/strikethrough) it gets even harder to make sure none of the styles interfere with each other in a way which might make it easy to misunderstand what state an action is currently in. (We're trying to keep orthogonal states styled with orthogonal styles, and trying to make sure they're all presented consistently and readably.)

But it doesn't sound like you're necessarily needing to style individual rows; it sounds like you'd like the ability to create a new style and then apply it to some rows. We do have a little bit of orthogonal styling state left: we haven't touched background color (except to indicate inbox items), so perhaps there's room to allow some amount of customization there like you can do with the colorizing rules in Mail. Would that help?

(I should also mention that 1.1 provides better customization options for the built-in styles. But I know that doesn't address this particular request!)