I disagree. Pasting plain text removes additional attributes, an operation that forces the user to redo work (add highlighting, bold, font choice, etc). For average users who will never learn about special alternate ways to paste, they NEVER want to redo work. They will hate it. For those of us who care, we can always just paste into a plaintext editor if we want plaintext.
Defaults often become "the only available option" and in that case I (and I think most folks) would prefer the defaulting to "as much info as possible is preserved on paste".
Exactly. On a bigger scale, the time wasted by people redoing the formatting because it isn't pasted by default would outweigh that wasted by people writing blog posts about having to remove it.
And if they're that animated by it, they're are likely the sort of user that would look for a solution and change the default or learn how to paste in their software of choice without formatting.
I'd really hate to see the return of the days when copying and pasting from Microsoft Word into a web form would result in hundreds of kilobytes of pseudo-HTML garbage.
Defaults often become "the only available option" and in that case I (and I think most folks) would prefer the defaulting to "as much info as possible is preserved on paste".