Ok, I get it, I love technical elegance too :-)
But if you'd like people to actually read what you write (and I get just writing for yourself too, I do a lot of that) then they shouldn't be the ones to pay the 'technical debt' IMO
Sadly nobody (nobody = vast majority of users now) knows about RSS anymore..
Text - absolutely, no hyperlinks or images in the actual content - ok. I get it.
However, it's like 10 minutes more work with the basic tools you outline to script outputting this stuff (without changing the base texts) into a browser in html with html links etc established through delivery code (which - html - after all, is the browsers lingua franca). IMO if you're bothering to put out content for users on the internet via http then it seems reasonable to do it in a way that they expect..
just my two penneth worth :-)