Good hypertext is hard and very labor intensive. A human brain has to decide how to mark the text, and that takes time. Sure, there are automatic conversion programs for many formats, but a good, clear document design still depends on real Homo Sapiens, not just software. It is much easier to make plain text available, and gopher has a natural simplicity in dealing with plain text. The Gopher menu format might seem rigid, but it forces every entry to have an associated title.
Reasonable titles are clear and descriptive, and they can be searched by programs like Veronica.
URLs embedded in HTML documents, in contrast, are not required to have any associated description at all. The item a URL points to might have a title, but you won't know what it is until you fetch it. WWW documents tend to become collections of small subdocuments, all pointing to each other, whereas Gopher documents tend to be larger, more cohesive pieces. This is perhaps an overgeneralization, and neither scheme really forces a particular style of document organization. The multiple sub-document structure is well suited to hyperertext manuals, where instant look up is valuable, but it is less useful when one wants to print out the whole set to get an overview.