Great to know about 1.9 - just looked through the 1.9 changelog and saw it described as "Newlines allowed before ternary colon operator (:) and method call dot operator (.)", so it does seem like they are encouraging this specific formatting style.

I agree that the fully indented code is much easier to visually parse - whether that outweighs the refactoring cost is certainly going to vary depending on the team (in addition to personal preference, as you mention).