Both styles have their place, I agree. The issue is making ~10,000 changes in an automated/mechanical edit, something the wiki advises against. I see these as imposing a personal style, and not objectively improving the map.

Regarding locality, we could both choose different areas and come up with different results. In politics, this is known as gerrymandering. It is worth noting that when looking at the UK as a whole, ~84% of address tags are on ways. This is an indicator of community preference.

I hope you'll agree these changes are both undiscussed (please provide context if I've missed any) and automated (ie, made using scripts or similar), and for those reasons, are best reverted to their former state.

Your prior work in this area has not gone unappreciated, and I hope you continue to contribute to OSM! :)