The ability to send a plain text email is not a skill people care about (mostly)

How about being able to transmit data undistorted from A to B?

I mean, it's not about emails must be ugly or must be read in white-on-black 80x25 terminals, it's about them not being distorted/broken on delivery.

If you can't manage that, then you should think about how this portrays you as a submitter. Doesn't matter if you zip, if you post diff on https: somewhere, if you uuencode or mime64, but not being able to choose tools for yourself that do NOT distort what you send is quite a powerful signal.

Ask yourself, if your ZFS-with-checksums or your VPN with authenticated headers or your file integrity checking software says "this incoming data is distorted", do you really imply that the first reaction is to turn off checksums and just eat the data? Is this the "missing generation" projects would lose?

I think I would like to be able to run OSes and code written by people that defaults to not turning checksums off on first indication of errors.