I largely agree with you, but:

How hard is it to use HN formatting? I can’t count how many times people screw it up.

It’s not difficult to begin with, the documentation is free, yet here I am reading your comment with broken formatting.

    something: nothing
      hello: goodbye

Anyone who has trouble with this is just being sloppy. No useless backticks! You might think you’re doing it right, but unless you check, maybe you’re not.