> In fact, I think it basically came from a niche group of Gopher hobbyist users who wanted to fix a few longstanding annoyances with Gopher.

To me Gemini looks like it was made by people that fetishized the idea of Gopher after reading about without ever have actually used it.

Gopher was not about reading documents, it was a way to map to resources. Those resources might be files or other servers. It was an improvement over FTP since gophermaps (menus) could be customized and link to servers rather than just files.

You could abuse information messages in a gophermap to make a readable document but it wasn't part of the RFC. You also had to make some terminal width assumptions because there wasn't a good way to control text reflow.

Gopher was interesting up until you used the web.