You do not come off as elitist in any way. Having your write-up available for your students makes perfect sense, though I don't know that posting it to Hacker News will result in much (but it doesn't seem like your target audience anyway).
I think "pythonic" is a slippery slope. Many people take it too far and begin to develop militant ideas of what "readability" means, or they do silly things. For instance, I once heard a tale about someone needing to create their own toolkit for handling paths in a certain project. It was just going to a wrapper around the usual os.path tools, but would factor out a lot of the team's repetitive code.
That person actually implemented __abs__ so that "abs(p)" resulted in the absolute path for the path object p. Ugh!
The justification was that this is supposed to be more "pythonic" than just writing a simple helper function. And of course, if you say that the documentation about Python idioms or accepted understandings of what is "pythonic" don't have anything to do with the choice to implement something as a special method, the other person's response is just "yes it does" -- their interpretation is that this is what pythonic means. It's like having an interpretation debate about the Bible or something. It means something different to everyone, which makes it pretty useless as a centralized standard.
If you apply good Haskell style, or good C style, or good Java style, to writing Python, your code will be absolutely fine and perfectly readable even in large enterprise codebases (perhaps more so depending on who else reads it).
I think Google's C++ guide has the right idea. You should follow the local conventions of the piece of code you're editing.
If you're working in a Python module where someone puts every function argument on a new line (even if you're not near the 80 char limit) like this
def foo(arg1,
arg2,
...):
# ...
then you should just also do that, and not waste time about whether this is more Pythonic
def foo(arg1, arg2,
arg3, ...):
I think if the Python community trumps up this idea of pythonic, it just alienates other people whose natural style (or the guides to their own main languages) tell them differently.
Over time, Python developers will learn when it's better to use map than a comprehension, how to style things, how avoid doing needlessly complicated things like the __abs__ example above. You don't have to drill "pythonic" stuff into them for that sort of clean code common sense to emerge, and you certainly don't need to make it a major point of community pride or identity.