Great post! I agree that customers don’t care about a style guide, they only care about the quality of their experience. One factor I think you may want to consider is the cost of deviating from a style guide. When a front-end dev is tasked with building that Holiday landing page you described, she can build it much faster if the landing page is made up of re-usable components that are already in the style guide. The more new styles that are in the design, the longer the implementation will take. Time = cost of development + opportunity cost of not building other impactful features. I’m not suggesting that designers don’t deviate from the style guide, just that when they do, they consider the cost of those deviations. Very enjoyable read! I’m excited to see more of your work!