I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing here re unopionated, but SGML (on what HTML is based) has had automatic recognition of Wiki text delimiters and produc

I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing here re unopionated, but SGML (on what HTML is based) has had automatic recognition of Wiki text delimiters and producing XML-style canonical markup from eg. markdown and other Wiki syntax since before 1986. Kind of the best of both worlds for both easy editing and rich and sophisticated structuring. It's also odd that we're still discussing these things after all these years; so long so, in fact, that we've forgotten how those before us tackled these issues.