As someone who occasionally wears the hat of a bad formalist, I’d like the point out that not only are rules made to be broken, they are often made to be very flexible and contextual. You learn them as “hard and fast” at first, then probe the areas where they’re bendy—and this bendiness can, if you’re clever, be restated in terms of more rules! Think of heuristic algorithms or neural networks in which “fuzziness” is implemented as a (rigid) complex of variables and priorities.

Of course this isn’t to say that rules are great criteria for the quality of some music; what they are is a framework to facilitate the work of and discussion among folks in the know.