Hyphenation points are a funny thing. People would commonly go for “aff-able” (aff-a-ble), but in such cases, you tend to get better results for reading by splitting in the middle of the repeated letter, or more generally the consonant sequence (af-fa-ble). I’m not certain if this is to do with phonemes (that is, the hyphenation matching how you speak) or to do with aiding with continuing (simply making it easier for you to pick up on the next line); I’ve thought about it a little, but not that much.

There’s a similar but more aggressive form of the problem in lyrics on sheet music, where you’re declaring a hyphenation point between all syllables (though good engraving will avoid placing unnecessary hyphens), and people often break syllables incorrectly or suboptimally. Pulling up one score I noticed this with when I received it last week or so, some examples: strang-ers, runn-ing, en-em-y, anch-or, surr-end-er. I’d split (or hyphenate) them as stran-gers, run-ning, en-e-my, an-chor, sur-ren-der. I’m not certain if I’d always hyphenate and lyrics-syllable-break in the same places, but in the cases I’ve contemplated I would, though I had to think about sur-ren-der versus sur-rend-er for a moment.

Also I can’t say exactly why my mind lighted on the word “affable” (it was the second word my mind came to, after I discarded “affiance”), but you made me think about it more deliberately and then I was curious to see what the first word in a dictionary would be. In my /usr/share/dict/words, the first (excluding proper nouns) is “affability”. (The last is “whiffs”, with “whiffletrees” as the last word I’d maybe consider hyphenating between the fs.)