I read my mail in Pine about half the time, and HTML email bugs me too. But I blame that on Pine. Here is why the anti-HTML faction are living on dogma. In the recent past, not sending HTML email was absolutely a correct way to live, because the availability of HTML renderers was not guaranteed. But times have changed.
Truth changes with the times.
It is a better tool for expressing meaning. It is more flexible, it can express fine shades of feeling more easily, it has some ability to attach semantic metadata. For example, the problem of URLs being broken by line wraps goes away.