Let me know whether I'm incorrect in what I've learned--especially since I've never studied Latin--but what I heard an English professor state was it was ridiculous not to split the infinitive when a writer wanted to get the adverb closer to the verb itself for emphasis. The professor's reasoning was that the Latin infinitive was a single word, not two as are English infinitives. By forcing the adverb to either precede or follow the two-word English infinitive, force was lost and awkwardness was often the only gain. He gave us a long list of sentences in which the two-word infinitive had not been split and companion sentences in which the adverb was nestled up right against the root verb after the "to." I thought his was a point well-taken.

WW