Ideally there would be a replacement of TeX that shares little of its non-math typesetting capabilities but retains (or only slightly modifies) the math syntax.

Ideally there would be a replacement of TeX that shares little of its non-math typesetting capabilities but retains (or only slightly modifies) the math syntax. The rest of the system is where the the problems lie, or at least where I waste a lot of time on little things.