Here's an attempt to get at an objective truth behind the format wars, in order to make it easier for folks to make informed if their own subjective decisions. Library science peeps and/or computer anthropologists might already know something I don't, which would make me give up an axe I keep grinding.

Suppose you were to take all of the reading devices that STILL exist today and are likely to ever exist in the future. This would include Kindle's, really old computer terminals in behind-the-times university CS departments, reasonable speculations about 200 years from now, AND, AND the software that everyone in the world has on their computer right NOW.

ii) has an inconvenient time on the screen reading the thing (from eye nuisance to ability to enlarge for those with poor vision).

Microsoft Word 1995 format (if there were such a thing) is probably out. WordPerfect for 3.1 Windows format is probably out. And so on. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. I truly believe that "text has gotta stay"-- someone said this years ago and it is the right decision, because some TXT formats will win the elimination contest I just described above.

ii) a format that is still all ASCII but removes all the end-of-column CR's, and only has double returns at the end of paragraphs.

IMO, this ii) wins 100% hands down for "convenient time on the screen for reading the thing", based on software that everyone has right now. Yeah, some peeps might be able to write a program that takes out these CR's, but I know one time I tried it in something like MS Word, I messed it up worse. But if someone has to write a program to read, that ruins the criteria of "convenient time right now." IMO, I'm willing to toss out of the lifeboat the University CS historian on his old terminal in favor of the millions of peeps with HTML browsers. I'm not advocating for HTML, but for a TXT version without the 80 char line breaks.