Your comments

I'm mystified why people would vote against this.  I think there may be a bit of a philosophical culture clash in action.  Tabs are a bit a religious issue.

In the UNIX world, I'd say the dominant view is that tabs should always be aligned to 8 columns.  Making any other assumption results in all kinds of breakage and awkwardness when it comes to using a shell: terminals all assume 8-column tabs, and if your source code assumes some other tab width, tools like diff and such are going to mangle your indentation.  At the same time, most projects (Linux kernel excepted) feel that 8-column indents are excessive, so in practice you need to use spaces for indentation.  Some projects then allow 8-column tabs as a sort of encoding optimization, and others forbid tabs entirely.  If tabs are allowed, then you really need separate settings for tab stops (":set ts=N" in vi) and indentation (":set sw=N" in vi).

As support for my claim that this is a reasonably common world-view: Google's internal coding standard for C++ specifies 2-column indents, 8-column tab stops, and recommends against tab characters, but they sneak into the code anyway.

I think in the Windows world there is no hard standard for tab stops and nothing to enforce one, since console usage is much more rare than in UNIX.  Thus it's a common Windows philosophy to conflate tabs and indentation.

In any case, I think Sublime 2 needs to implement a setting for indentation width independent of tab stops in order to be taken seriously by people and shops which subscribe to the UNIX philosophy.