A petty obsession

I received a document from a university research office where I'm having a grant application reviewed.  One of the themes of this process has been the importance of good and consistent formatting of documents, and use of a particular writing style.

Those wonderful pedants have had their way with my six weeks of toil, and what do I receive?  A document which puts dates in the following formats:

1. Monday 10th May at 9am
2. 9am on Monday the 10th of May
3. 9am, Monday May 10th
4. Monday 10/5 at 9

One of my more memorable encounters with a research supervisor was being flamed out for incorrect date formats (albeit applied consistently).  Since then, I've mended my ways in accordance with the MLA Handbook (6 ed.).  This is the writers' book on the laws of style.  Nobody should be permitted to enter the second year of an undergraduate degree without having acquired it in the first.  It's even online now, although you have to subscribe.

The essence of the rule about writing dates is very simple: hybrids of numbers and words are forbidden.  Thus, the big bloopers above should be:

1. Monday 10 May
2. Monday the TENTH of May
3. Monday, May 10

I don't think any editor worth his or her salt would allow the fourth example.

My preferred style is #1 above.  It gives the information in the order in which you would say it, which makes it a logical sequence that doesn't require a mental backflip to process.  I never add the suffixes -st, -nd, -rd, -th to a number when writing a date -- reporting the placing of contestants in an athletic competition is a different matter, of course.  How you write a date is not the same as how you say it.  I just can't bring myself to appreciate these little superscript numbers.  They are the bane of good formatting.

When adding times, it's a question of asking how you would say the thing, and expressing it fully.  9am looks a bit incomplete to me, 9.00 raises the question "which one?".  9.00am seems about right -- you'd say "nine o'clock in the morning" (OK, antemeridian for you unreconstructed Latinists out there).  Then it becomes a case of the following sequence:

Number, word number word = 9.00am, Monday 10 May.

Is that elegant, or what?

Why is it so few people see the light?