Does anyone really type in the textarea fields anything but the most trivial bits of text?

I do.

Most of my less-trivial code snippets posted here are written using my code editor, tested, and then pasted into the text box.

But 100% of the actual text and markup tags of all of my 300 or so posts to this site were typed directly into the textarea field. Why not?

A textarea is far too limiting of an editing environment for my tastes and I am quite surprised that others don't find it so. When I'm writing and editing text I want to do it in the best editing environment I have, not some crude, barely functional text widget in a browser. Everything I post here is written in a real editor and pasted into the textarea. I can't think of a single reason not to use a real editor.

It depends what you're used to, and what you're doing. If you're mostly just typing in some text, not doing a lot of editing, such as for a short comment like this one with only a couple of tags, you can get by with a textarea okay. Basically, whatever you could do in a very basic text editor (a la Notepad) you can do in a textarea. Obviously, for anything more complex, you want a real editor -- by which, obviously, I mean Emacs ;-)

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$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

Most of my posts are written directly in the textarea. This is mostly because I'm highly lazy, and often falsely lazy. It's also because cut-and-paste in X tends to mess me up for some reason. It's also because I become more perfectionistic about my formatting when I'm using an HTML editor, to the point where I never end up posting. (See, for example, this half-done tutorial on context, which I normaly would have just posted where I started writing it, and not decided that it should be recast as a tutorial... so now it's sitting, waiting for me to have another burst of wanting to talk about such things. (BTW, the contents of my pad tends to change quite a bit, so if you're reading this significantly after it's posted, that link is unlikely to go anywhere useful.)