(Disclaimer: I worked for Six Apart Services for 2 years)
I don't think MT has "weird perlisms", it's just... written in perl. WordPress took off around the time folks were realizing that you could build big sites in PHP, and so PHP in general was taking off (as Byrne mentions in his piece, more enterprise sites were adopting PHP as well). Perl started a slide back into "sysadmin" land as far as many developers and managers were concerned.
Static publishing is not a "quirk": it's a feature that sold MT to most of the large publishers using it. Yes, you have to make some design decisions with static publishing in mind, but I've never heard of an MT site being Fireballed, either.
I just realized that NV allows you to specify where to find/save text files (in that little drop-down I'd been ignoring!) I've since cloned my wiki repo to a location in my ~/Documents folder and pointed NV there. Looks like it's going to work.
Hey, scrod, no prob. Can't believe I forgot it! One other feature I DO love is that the official NV does wiki-style [[links]] that are compatible with github's wiki markup.
I personally use the markdown preview a lot, so it's worth it to me to use nvalt, but I tend to switch back and forth between the two. Does NV offer markdown preview yet? If you're new to NV and don't care about the preview (I may be the only one who does :-) ) then consider the official build by all means.
I've been after Tantek to explain Whistle (his url shortener) to me for a while now, and I was glad that it fit in with this series of questions. I particularly liked his point about the url being expandable by any third-party because the algorithm is published.
Obviously this prevents some "monetization" of the shortener, but that's the whole point - to prevent your links from being beholden to a single provider.
I'll be continuing the series of interviews as we work through the 10 basic components of Tantek's personal DiSo 2.0 vision.