What happened to "do one thing, but do it well"?
Why a F**king Transfer Protocol should define a damn file format?
Also, why should such a protocol specify a builtin crypto? It's better to let specialized tools do the crypto (because it's really hard to implement that correctly, and same for just using the libraries which do it), exactly the way HTTP can do it.
The main advantage of Gemini against Gopher is: it removed deprecated stuff. The main common point it have is: it will have deprecated stuff soon, and will be stuck with it because of legacy.

I've read gemini's specs. We talked about it a lot on IRC last year (edit: was it around august?), and my opinion is: this protocol sucks. Gopher, at least, was invented at a time where people had to _invent_ and experiment, there was no previous world wide network, there were not even stuff to, well, blog easily in a university (it was created for such "big" LAN). Gemini could learn from it, but didn't.
Instead, it's built to not be extended (why not), and (try to) do everything in a single layer: encryption, file transfer, file format.

I would, indeed, like to have a simple file transfer protocol, which *do not* specify encryption, *do not* explicitly require TCP (yes, that's a requirement for TLS) and thus allows broadcast (reduces resource cost for server and lot of hardware, thus lesser energy cost) and *do not* specify a file format, but *does* allow easy file/directory discovery, over several systems (mirroring).

Encryption should be a lower layer, file format should be something above.
Having client softwares which do the rendering of specific file formats... yes, that's nice. But that's the user-side, it should not have any impact on the protocol.
Now, specs for a name could specify an encryption layer, one (or more) file transfer protocols and a format. No problem with that. That's basically what UEFI does: standard UEFI must implement support for BOOTP, DHCP, TFTP, HTTP, GPT, and whatnot. That does not means that each of those protocols/formats must know the other ones.