Hyphens as a signalling mechanism

The economist in me could not stop thinking about inefficiency and wasted effort today as a team of us sat tediously pouring over a grant proposal and checking it for minor formatting issues or inconsistencies.  Four highly trained individuals (whose time is presumably valuable) spent about 2 hours today (after spending countless hours all summer) essentially debating, among other things, when it was appropriate to shorten "first-generation" to "FG" and when it should be "first-generation" with a hyphen vs. "first generation" without a hyphen.  This was all in order to appease future readers of our grant who, I'm 99.999999% sure couldn't care less.  None-the-less, this is the way the game is played, and everyone has to do it lest their grant ends up in the trash can for appearing unprofessional.

I have similar thoughts every time I see a friend repainting or otherwise renovating their home just to sell it, knowing full well that the buyer is likely to paint it themselves in a color they like better.  I had a friend who bought a house with a newly remodeled kitchen, tore it out and put in one he liked better, then later tore that out to make it more generic and easier to sell, only to have the eventual buyer tear that one out and put yet another kitchen in. 

I would be FASCINATED to see someone try to estimate the percentage of our economy that is devoted to either redundant or totally un-valued/pointless effort.  I'm not even talking about the time we waste watching Jersey Shore - I'm talking about the time we waste essentially digging a hole and filling it back in, or proofreading blog posts that only we will ever read.  My gut feeling is that we would all cry if we knew the answer.

Then again, often this type of effort serves to carry a signal about an uncertain, unobservable underlying quality, and to that end it does have value and serves a purpose.  If you don't know anything about me and aren't sure whether I'm likely to do a good job following through on my grant compared with another proposer who you also don't know, then you either have to just flip a coin and pick one randomly to fund, or you have to try to glean some information from another observable factor that may be correlated with the thing you really want to know.  Economic theory tells us that this will be most effective when sending such a signal is costly.  And there's nothing more costly than spending time editing hyphens.

Has anyone else run across similar instances of totally wasted or redundant time or effort lately?