Resting on My Laurels

The latest submission call has been answered, and the next one has a head start that I'd disbelieve if the story length weren't so minuscule; so tonight, I honestly have very little to think about it, narratively speaking. Instead, I'm wondering about Standard Manuscript Format.

Everyone who's submitted to a magazine has encountered this concept; a set of rules and regulations that govern how you present your story. Most magazines, even most online magazines, follow this rule. And to a certain degree, it confuses me.

Disclaimer: This is not a rant against the "hoops" of publishing. While I'd prefer it if a bit more pap were caught by the standardization nets I understand that the rules of the publishing industry exist for much the same reasons rules of etiquette exist: to ensure everyone is (theoretically) working off the same base assumptions. I even understand it more than social etiquette, because publishers, unlike most conversationalists, are risking a great deal of money on the endeavor, and it pays to have some methods of filtering out flukes, flakes, and the other detritus that tends to coalesce around the edges of the population that terms itself "writers". What makes me wonder isn't the hoops themselves; what makes me wonder is that the hoops regarding Standard Manuscript Format seem so strangely backward.

Google "Standard Manuscript Format". Most of the top hits will use some variation on this sentence: "Standard Manuscript Format is meant to make your manuscript look like it was typed on a typewriter".

Obvious Question Time: Why?

I understand wanting standardization, and the double-spacing and wide margins makes perfect sense, as, after an explanation, does the use of underlines rather than italics; but it strikes me that, barring nostalgia, Times New Roman is a far less eye-tearing font than Courier, and it comes loaded standard on nearly every word processing program you will find on a modern machine. Why on Earth don't we use that instead? Is it because print magazine editors are concerned about excluding those who still use typewriters, and online magazine editors want to emulate print magazines so as to avoid an (understandably problematic) cultural divide? Is it just moribundity at work?

I'm not ranting; I'm asking. I'm thinking that perhaps in all this, there is some aspect of the typesetting and printing world that I am not understanding here; that there is some way in which what we are doing is making life easier for the editors, who are in turn working to make life easier for the typesetters, who are in turn making mechanized life easier for the printing presses themselves.

Can you enlighten me? If so, please do. I'm terribly intrigued by this mystery.