The only drawback as I can see it is that people can spoil themselves by opening those files
Re: spoiling by using plain text, you could easily just store them encrypted or compressed. Any language will have a library for doing either of those. The files will be so small that any performance concerns would be moot.
If you encrypt: users can't edit, and can't spoil themselves.
If you compress: users can edit, they can spoil themselves, but it puts a small barrier to being able to do so to dissuade the casual user.
