Peeve

For at least 15 years, this sort of thing has irritated the living shit out of me:
“Blah blah blah foo blah blab.”
Yes. I mean that incredibly stupid attempt to fake curly publisher’s quotes there at the beginning of the sentence. Two “`” characters were sacrificed to someone’s seriously skewed sense of beauty in publishing.
What is the FUCKING point of that? There is a perfectly good double-quote key on EVERY keyboard I’ve ever seen. What’s wrong with using it instead of that seriously ugly workaround?
I’ll be the first to say that every time I install a word processor, I disable curly quotes (because first, they’re ugly, and second, they’re extended characters that don’t cut and paste well into text documents). I just don’t see the point of trying to emulate them in plain text, and it looks incredibly stupid on the web where you actually CAN use real curly publisher’s quotes if you want.
Pet peeve, yes, but a plea for good design at the same time.