Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and other people will be annoyed at you. Different solutions for different needs.
That said the community+software is good at what it does. I can be sad it's intolerant of lists without needing to disparage it further.
Besides in a Q&A network, a "list question" has "list answers" where every "answer" is a "list", rather than an item of that list. Even that doesn't really work because that's not historically the way the site is actually used.
See also the following for the rationale:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-an...
No knock on SE. Quite the opposite.
But I frequently have questions that aren't SE style questions, and I wish I knew where to take them for such intelligent and informed responses.
I really strongly believe that it's an either/or proposition, you either get discussion or you get quality answers to questions. Discussion "sucks the air out", so to speak.
And since there are already so many places for discussion on the internet, it's better for us to focus on Q&A.