I think a lot of these things are experience-related, or usually cemented within a specific implementation. A lot of people may apply these principles correctly because that's what they find works best, without necessarily bringing it to a conscious level, or to a level of explicitness that makes it easy to teach or use.

Garrett Smith is starting to hit on that with http://www.erlangpatterns.org/ and trying to broadcast that kind of information to the rest of the community, but I'm guessing participation hasn't been strong enough to help (I know I haven't participated enough to that website personally)