Comment by Pinus

Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted, monospaced, text. That way, you can use asterisks as bullets, as footnote markers and as emphasis markers all at the same time, and anyone who is familiar with normal typographic conventions will understand what is what.