Love your essay. Had a similar reaction when one of the pubs I write for switched to a "black background/white type face" format. They applied this retroactively to all the stories in the pub and I often feel like their readership numbers went down after that. I still write for them (but less) because often I think the stories just look "a bit off," when they do it that way. Wish I had a better "why" answer but it's mostly a personal preference/feeling in my case.