the engineer vs the designer

I feel like my development draws from two sides of me, the engineer, and the designer.

The engineer part of me wants to say "come on, arial,helvetica,sans-serif, and maybe a courier,monospace - that's all you need. Oh and maybe Impact sometimes, for flair". The designer knows better.

In theory, the designer part of me should be advocating for "proper" quotemarks, the ones that curl around, vs those inch and foot marks that are so much easier to reliably type. In practice, I don't care all that much. And the UX part of me teams up with the engineer in me to DESPISE when they are autocorrected, especially when pasting. It makes sharing code in certain chat programs (I think Hipchat may have had that issue but I don't remember seeing it in Slack) or even recording stuff in "Evernote" problematic.

Actually, Evernote, like a dozen other programs, tries to preserve typefaces and font sizes and colors, sometimes background and foreground. How often does that help? I see its utility SOMETIMES, but should for paste default really be to make everything look like a goofy ransom note? There are some conventions that some programs follow - add a shift to cmd- or ctrl-V pastes "special", and often stripped down, but it's not consistently followed - and again, I'm not convinced it's a smart default especially when "remove formatting" isn't always readily visible.