It's like learning how to read, or learning how to read a new script. At first, you focus on the letters, composing words or sentences. When you get more experience, you read ever-larger blocks of text at once and you no longer need to read aloud or read aloud in your head, you can read whole lines or several lines at once and immediately transfer the concepts embodied in them into your mind (this is effectively how people read - chunks of text at a time, it's also why it's easy to read text where the letters of all words are mingled except the first and last one, a feat that is impossible when reading letter by letter or even word by word).
Anyway, in reading/writing code it's the same - at some point you no longer see a line with statements, you see a block with initializations, or no longer a set of if/then or switch statement, you see a jump table. Once you get to that level, dollar signs to denote variables disappear from the mental model you have, because you no longer see tokens - you see variables (same with semicolons, braces, most indentation, etc.). That's where the comparison came from.
(I also think that that's where eloquent code comes from - it's from programmers who make an efficient and recognizable translation from high-level concepts into the mechanics of the programming language, even if there is no explicit support for such concepts in the language).
But a crappy typeface or color scheme can still give me a headache.
No one can argue with you because you just claim knowledge superiority that can't be confirmed or denied.
People care about this stuff, I don't care if you don't, if other people do, then it's an issue.
besides that, its really easier to read the code with semi colon, when you get used to it.
also.. flash got optional ;