Can confirm. I wrote (for publication) about six novels using POD format plus some basic command line tools and a makefile, treating RTF as a final output forma

Can confirm. I wrote (for publication) about six novels using POD format plus some basic command line tools and a makefile, treating RTF as a final output format, back in the day. (I was forced to adopt Microsoft Word for checking copy-edits only when my publishers insisted on moving to a Word/InDesign based workflow and ditching paper edits -- this was around 2008. Which in turn forced me to stop using vim as my main creative tool. If I had discretion to go back to chewing on text files today, I'd probably go with Markdown or a superset thereof.)