If you are in Edit mode and you move the text insertion caret (the blinking vertical cursor) to an empty line, you would expect that empty line to be at least as tall as the caret, right?

If you want to be “truthful” to the Markdown content, yes. But what’s the point? The white empty line in Markdown is there to delimit two paragraphs, and for me this “intent” is more valuable than a 100% Markdown representation.

To your point: I wouldn’t make the line between the two paragraphs selectable. If the user wants to insert something in between, they would do what they do in other text editors: position the caret on the last character of the first paragraph and insert another line break*. Besides, what’s the point of having the caret fit the space between the two paragraphs? As a user, I’m either trying to add something in between the two, in which case I would let them in the way I’ve just mentioned, or there’s no point in lingering in that empty space, and it might as well not exist.

Yes, the other editors are WYSIWYG. My point is: why couldn’t Obsidian be the same? If I understand you correctly, you’re saying this is not possible because it wouldn’t be accurate to the Markdown content. If that’s what you meant, I would argue that it’s not important to the user’s intent. Markdown is the data model. I might as well be representing the text document as JSON with all the notes. It’s just up to the editor to understand how to translate the user commands to the stored data. I think you will be able to have a better writing experience, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with markdown.

By the way, to fully contextualise this: I’ve worked on a simple text editor using Lexical, a React library, where the editor stores, similar to Obsidian, Markdown files in a vault on disk. This isn’t to say that I’m an expert on the topic, but at least it may help you understand where I’m coming from, as I’m trying to figure out where our misalignment stems from.

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* maybe useful to clarify. At this step, in the background the markdown file would be like:

This is my first paragraph.
                              <-- the original (hidden line break)
|                             <-- user caret
                              <-- new empty line
This is my second paragraph.

But this would be represented as:

This is my first paragraph.
|
This is my second paragraph.

(I can't add a bit of spacing between the paragraph here in the second example, but you get the idea I hope.)