The store setting for enable/disable WYSIWYG is missing from the store general settings page

I couldn't find it on any other settings pages.

That doesn't make sense to me.

The only reason someone wants to turn off the html editors is because they do not want any html in their descriptions. Your explanation requires the user to manually edit the html in order to prevent that from happening.
Every single time. Because by default, even a 1-character product description on a brand new product still gets paragraph html tags.

Not to mention the fact everywhere else in the system is already written to handle the store setting, including the UIHint. So leaving out the setting itself just seems really, really weird to me.

In my opinion it boils down to proper site design. If the intent is to have the entire site design managed and controlled through CSS style sheets, which I think we all agree it should be, the product descriptions should never have any HTML. Because that HTML is going to override everything else in the CSS. At least in AC9 you went to an awful lot of trouble to make CSS the primary means for controlling site look and feel. Unless it's a product description......

More importantly, there are numerous cloud services out there that want catalog data. Google product feeds, Nextopia, Klevu, SearchSpring, SharpSpring etc. They all want product description, and those descriptions need to be clean and free of html.

My understanding was that the ability to disable the html editor was intended to force keeping html out of descriptions. At least I didn't see any other meaningful purpose for having the toggle otherwise.

Once you start loading up your product descriptions with fancy graphics and elaborate fonts/styling, you immediately deviate from all of the prescribed styling and layout dictated by the CSS. Because the inline HTML editor doesn't read your store CSS style sheet, or the custom style sheet. Now descriptions look different from all other text in the site. If the goal is a clean, consistent look-and-feel to the overall site design...the html editor just blew that idea clean out of the water the moment you start using it.

In the 7.x days, product Summary was the html-free field and Description was the html-friendly field. But AC9 has the html editor on both now. There's no place to put a clean version of the product description on the product itself. So when we want to build feed files for cloud services that can't or won't handle html in the content, we've got a massive problem.

I agree. In a perfect world, the html editor would only permit 'basic' html elements like bullets, line breaks, numbered lists and nothing more.

I guess in a very perfect world, the html editor would base it's choices and WYSIWYG rendering from the actual site theme, and not from it's own hard-coded choices. And then the choices you make are done with css classes, not inline styled. It's that inline html styling that blows so much up.

In the old days, I don't think it mattered as much how much you loaded up the description with html. Now it causes far more hassle than it's worth if you ever want to hook into cloud ecommerce services like search providers.

On the surface meta description looks like a good candidate. But the meta description for a product can (and should) be very different from the actual product description. And as you mentioned, it's quite limited in size.

I don't think we need to make a major change. I feel like you're over-thinking this way too much. All I originally pointed out was one missing store setting on one settings page. So far as I can tell, that setting is still checked everywhere in the store where it needs to be checked. It is confusing (as a programmer) to find accommodations in the code for a store setting that isn't even there any more. Upgraded stores may not expect the setting to be gone. And you've essentially removed a feature from the software for what seems to be a pretty poor reason "Because the user can edit it manually and remove the html themselves".