Why would allowing developers (maintainers included) to post, vote on, and edit formatted markdown comments make it harder for maintainers to deal with my code?
Because voting isn't important and plaintext is easier to deal with than markdown. Plaintext works in a terminal and with embedded patches and inline replies and so on. You don't grok it, that doesn't make it worse.
Voting is absolutely important. It makes it easier to gauge the community's reaction to issues, PRs, and comments, and cuts down on "me too" type comments which might otherwise clutter issues.
> plaintext is easier to deal with than markdown
Markdown _is_ plain text. I've been writing all my comments up to this point in Markdown. Did you notice?
> Plaintext works in a terminal and with embedded patches and inline replies and so on.
So does Markdown. The difference is that Markdown can _also_ be rendered as pretty, fully-formatted text in a web browser.
You have to understand that you have a severely different outlook on FOSS maintainership than these projects do. You simply don't grok it. It's not like the maintainers here are unaware of the alternatives.
