languagegeek:You can blame good ol’ Bishop Lowth et al. for all those silly rules.

Bishop Lowth is someone I never agreed with. A sentence is something we can always add a preposition to. Besides, I need to rarely split infinitives, so it is no big deal to blatantly ignore by.

languagegeek:What they were after was “dignifying” English so that it could be a polite language on par with the rest of Europe. In reality, they were applying Latin rules of grammar to English. Latin infinitives can’t be split, right then, neither can English infinitives. In fact, prescribing language in terms of Latin was very common back in the day – I have even seen Cherokee grammar described in Latin terms... what a mess!

Hmm it seems not all agree with that, for example I found the following in this Wikipedia article:

It is sometimes claimed that in centuries past, English prescription was based on the norms of Latin grammar, but this is doubtful. Robert Lowth is frequently cited as one who did this, but in fact he specifically condemned "forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language".[5] It is true that analogies with Latin were sometimes used as substantiating arguments, but only when the forms being thus defended were in any case the norm in the prestige form of English. A good example is the split infinitive: supporters of the construction frequently claim the old prohibition was based on a false analogy with Latin, but this seems to be a straw man argument; it is difficult to find a serious writer who ever argued against the split infinitive on the basis of such an analogy, and the earliest authority to advise against the construction, an anonymous American grammarian in 1834, gave a very clear statement basing his view on descriptive observation.[6]

erinja:If I want to say "It's good to see you", I don't need to make up a fake subject "it" in Esperanto. I say simply "Estas bone vidi vin" (no subject)

No, "vidi vin" is the subject. Also, in the sentence "plaĉas al mi ke vi helpis min", "ke vi helpis min" is the subject.