Definitely one of the strangest rules is to run ports lower than 1024 on sudo (or root). I am guessing it was an over reaction to the dangers that presented the

Definitely one of the strangest rules is to run ports lower than 1024 on sudo (or root). I am guessing it was an over reaction to the dangers that presented themselves when running a server on the internet, but if you think about it, requiring all servers that talk to the internet to also have root access - that's the exact opposite thing you want to do.