I can only talk about my preferences. I despise editors which include invisible formatting characters.
If I need a properly rendered text document, I use LaTeX.
But even more than that I enjoy people sending me a screenshot of their terminal (with cut off error messages) emedded in a Word document. 
This is ugly. . . I think this is a bad choice
In my experience, in the MD editor viewer the cursor changes over the links (as expected) while in the WYSIWYG editor this does not happen.
I think this can be confusing because it is not the usual behavior of the links (at least in Windows; in my case). There is also no indication about pressing the Ctrl key.