Thanks for bringing this up, Stephen, as it's a topic that troubles me regularly.
First, I am terrible at getting horizons straight: as soon as I'm looking through the viewfinder, I seem to go into a different world and have no idea if I'm getting it straight or not. It's OK if I'm on the level myself (e.g., standing in a normal posture) but the moment I'm doing somehing weird (stooping and twisting sideways to look out from underneath a low branch or etc.) I can get a long, long way out of kilter and not realise it.
I hate the results, and so work on it consciously, among other things, glancing at the horizon first to decide how close to level it should be in the picture, then mentally measuring off the angular distance from the horizon to one of the focus-point marks on the left of the VF, then to the equivalent mark on the right. That works OK. But I'd still give my left unmentionable for a viewfinder with a built-in spirit level!
Second, yes, I do think it matters.
Third, the sloping landscape dilemma. Yup, getting it right can look wrong. I think the answer is that with a sloping horizon you need to think about it in advance and do something to make sure that, in the final result, the horizon is going to be obviously correct - i.e., find something in your composition to make people see something other than the sloping horizon: either provide a vertical reference (such as a tree or a building) somewhere fairly obvious in the picture, or else do something else so that the eye is drawn to the point of interest and the horizon is just accepted unconsciously. In fact, if you are not doing this second thing, then maybe your picture doesn't have enough interest in it to be a keeper anyway.
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