I came to Oracle after it adopted the ANSI syntax, so that's what I use. So my experience is the opposite of yours -- when I see the (+) I need to look up the syntax to remember if it's left or right outer.
It's so much better to use a database that only allows one autoincrementing value per record, or one TIMESTAMP and then only allows you to have either a create timestamp or an update timestamp without writing a trigger.
I prefer the way Oracle does it, you may have to do more work but it's more explicit and flexible that way.
