Having to put in explicit html tags for paragraph breaks and (un)ordered lists is admittedly a "dated", antiquated, tedious process (and tables? jeez!), but I put up with it here because in the long run, it's less work to exert that sort of explicit control than to cope with the vagaries and quirks of "smart markup".

As for making the code snippets more "appealing", this bit from the OP points to an issue that is, I think, essentially unavoidable:

...I had to copy&paste it in my editor and indent it there and benefit from the syntax highlighting.

Yeah, I do that a lot around here too (I'm so grateful to have emacs' "perl-mode" and "perl-indent-exp"). But guess what: if the page layout were trying (and occasionally failing) to apply some sort of "normalized" indentation and syntax highlighting, I'd still have to do that -- but now I'd be doing it on code posted by people who aren't novices at writing perl, but are only novices at controlling the "automatic" formatting.

(Either that, or the experienced posters would be wasting time trying to circumvent the "normalization", or simply turning it off.)

And would the imposition of indenting and highlighting really help the newbie posters who seem to need it most? Or would it simply be another source of frustration and confusion? ("My code isn't showing up the way I expect it to! What's wrong with this web site?" Try explaining to such people that the web site is now also trying to function as "smart editor", pointing out the syntax errors in their code... before other monks even have a chance to respond to their posts!)

I'm with GrandFather: it's more effective for all concerned when posted code is presented "as-is" and unadorned from the poster's own source. On a cost/benefit basis, I think the proposal to add automatic formatting of code will fall be the wayside.