It seems to me that the (really quite subtle) preferences which are being discussed here are more than a little affected by the music font. I've not done a survey, but it seems to me after looking at the various examples, and at the books on notation, that Lilypond's font has a bigger discrepancy of size between the whole note and smaller note heads, and that this difference is making the leger line length discrepancy more noticeable.
Paul
