Sacrilege

When Knuth started on TeX, his motivation is reported to have been to improve math typesetting, because his earlier books were often mangled by typesetters/printers who did not understand the math and hence did not notice when they got it wrong.

Hence, the whole point of and reason for TeX is to produce good-looking math.

Why, then, is this still allowed to happen today?

Use \mathit{}, people!

Update: Then again, from the same paper:

ISWYDT.