I’m not a big fan of classic user preference dialogs where you have to hunt a million sections for the thing you care about. Where it’s possible to do it intuitively, I prefer to integrate preferences into the part of the application they regulate, where the user is likely to look for them.
In this vein, I just added a little pushpin widget to load the rich-text editor by default. Here’s what it looks like:
Under the hood, it makes an API call to toggle the preference. This means it’s a real preference, not stored in your browser. Any new review or other long form text field you write or edit will be loaded in rich text until you click the pushpin again. Is it intuitive? I don’t know — feel free to comment on the relevant bug if you think it can be improved. But I do like that it doesn’t make me go hunting in a “user preferences” section.
Speaking of clutter, I also find it important to prune features that no longer make sense. Accordingly, we’ll be removing the “live preview” feature soon, since it’s made largely obsolete by the rich-text editor. If you disagree, speak up on the bug :-).