While I disagree with the original poster, I've pondered the debate, and if a middle ground needs to be found, something involving Brad Choate's Textile would be very nice.

This accepts HTML, or if none is specified it adds BR, P, LI and other tags acording to a very simple ruleset. Single newlines become linebreaks. Double newlines denote paragraph. Asterisks denote lists, etc. It would most likely add some overhead to PM however, as its best store the raw text in the database, then apply Textile to it when being rendered as a node, rather than presenting HTML in a TEXTAREA to a user who hasn't entered any.