Comment by cxr

Your whole message is trying to sell me on the idea that "low-friction" interfaces are a good thing for the common pleb, but you don't have to sell me on it. I've believed it from the start ("need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like most don't know that HTML is plain text"), and you continue to ignore that WYSIWYG and the ability to be neatly based on a plain text format are not fundamentally opposed. There exist editors and viewers for Markdown today whose UIs prioritize the "rendered" view over presenting the user with, say, the raw text cast in a monospace font. I even referenced one by name.

> An efficient, effective UI for occasional amateur users is not the same as the UI for high-volume professional users.

I disagree. Specifically, I disagree that the amateur UI can't be made to work just as well much of the time for expert users, and that where it doesn't, it can still form the basis for that which is eventually exposed to the experts and will never be seen by the amateurs. For that reason, I find your big brains comment about dealing with "the unnecessarily high costs of [...] suboptimal solutions" (like "expert mode" UIs that are difficult to grapple with not because they're intended for experts, but because they're just poorly conceived) more apropos than you intended.