> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book

That might be true.

When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.

But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.