The other point that I should have made in the above, but it was already too long so I’ll toss it in here, is that it’s really hard to get people to write consistently. Whether you’re in an organization where you’re leaning on employees to spend some time writing (like we do with our folks at Collective Idea), or you’re trying to coax a steady flow out of talented freelancers, there are always a bazillion more reasons not to ship a post in the CMS than there are to buckle down and ship it.

In this context, small frictions and inconveniences add up a lot. So it’s not just about optimizing freelancer time, but about reducing the perceived friction that stands between them and the “submit” button. If submitting a finished product, with images and fenced code blocks and so on, is a pain, then the editor responsible for keeping the blog populated will have fewer submissions in the queue. This is another reason why the little writer-friendly optimizations that WP already has add up to big wins.