The answer to the first question is that parentheses are usually designed to fit well primarily with lowercase characters and/or mixed case characters. I suppose all caps with parentheses is less called for as a rule.

The answer to the second question is that computer character sets are descended from those used by teletype terminals which were in turn descended from typewriters. To keep the number of keys to a minimum, the straight quote mark was invented for typewriters. True typographic quote marks were added to computer character sets later when computers were adapted to set type.

to a beginning typophile like myself, they are a bit, ahem, dry reading

hmmm... maybe i'm just weird, but i loved reading Elements. I need to read it again...

Most punctuation is designed to work best with the lowercase. One of the great features of OpenType is that if you set something in an all-caps setting, OT savvy programs can adjust the punctuation accordingly on the fly. nifty eh?
In the same respect, most typesetting applications do the same thing with quotemarks - automaticaly replacing (in most cases) the appropriate quotes for the job. Not all applications do this, resulting in my pet peeve of typography - the ugly, stray prime mark as an apostrophe.
Even though good applications should be able to do as much of this kind of thing as possible without you having to do a lot of tweaking, you should be aware of these kinds of things so that you can make sure that these auto replacements are in fact doing what you want them to and not just messing up your text setting.

I suppose all caps with parentheses is less called for as a rule.

Except when introducing acronyms: e.g., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) ...

but shouldn't those actually be smallcaps? LOL *breaks out Elements*

Acutally, I guess if you follow Bringhurst's suggestions it should be Nasa, since that's how we read it (page 49).

Nasa is a little rare because you read it like a word, acronyms such as International Business Machines (IBM) or What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) don't pronounce as words so well.

I would simply use the same conventions used for all other acronyms in the piece. and if you choose to kern or vertically adjust the baseline I would bring to your attention another point Bringhurst makes.

Kern consistently and modestly or not at all. (page 32)

"Dumb" quotes have become the norm. (It's a dumb old world, innit?)

Curly quotes tip off average readers that the text is too difficult for them (or the product advertised too upscale). Or that it's historical usage.

The demise of the curly quote makes sense -- why complicate typography with unnecessary alternate glyphs for the same character, whose usage is determined by arcane contextual conventions?

There is a parallel: the long "s" was a similarly deployed alternate form abolished during a period of rapid typographic modernization, c.1800.

P