I personally keep all lines under 80 characters, but I also work on projects in teams where other programmers don't care about line length.
I love using whitespace-mode, but the long line visualization is really annoying when I'm working on projects where I shouldn't interfere with the long lines. It seems like it should be easy to turn off the long line visualization---I hit m-x global-whitespace-toggle-options l, and then can hit m-x global-whitespace-toggel-options ? to confirm that the "long-line visualization" is turned off. But long lines are still highlighted. I kill buffers and reload them, and highlighting is still there. I'm definitely using global, not local, whitespace-mode.
Why can't I turn off the long line visualization?