alright then:
1) it seems to be more common, a convention if you will – I have dozens of examples, but I don’t think you need them since they are in your blogroll too; photomatt is actually one of the few weblogs I read regularly that omits leading zeros in permalinks, 2) I think it looks more familiar to people not used to permalinks or any dates in URIs whatsoever, and it is closer to the ISO date standard (which is YYYY-MM-DD, i.e. with double digits) arguably giving a more intuitive feel for the order of month and date, 3) it just looks better when the links have the same length and variables have the exact same position all the way up until the title, 4) as a principle, the publisher should be given as many options as possible, and 5) I’m pretty much happy with everything else.
(it was at this point that the uniform-clad Matt, visible only as a dark silhouette against a sunrise over a war-torn landscape, started to shout out his frustration… ??