This is a great series of articles but I couldn't help and think that if you have to be so analytical about this, you will do better to trade with a designer that gets it more intuitively.
A lot of these rules exist simply because something looks or feels better (or is more readable, or simpler, or more historically consistent, etc.) Unless you can empathise with the underlying reasons, you will be memorising and misapplying a lot of rules.
I hope that you're saying this as a developer/engineer that is unaware of all the theory behind design, not as a designer that believes what they do is all intuition and there's no theory to learn that will make themselves (and their intuition) better.
I was saying that as a developer that has experience doing design.
For example, a lot of people in fashion and design are able to tell what colours go together without analysing tables or systems of complementary colours. I'm really not making this up - most great creative people understood a lot of this instinctively (and a lot of it is a lot harder to systematise than colour theories, for example.)
A lot of these rules exist simply because something looks or feels better (or is more readable, or simpler, or more historically consistent, etc.) Unless you can empathise with the underlying reasons, you will be memorising and misapplying a lot of rules.