Disingenuous? Maybe you're unaware of why Knuth invented TeX in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#His

Disingenuous? Maybe you're unaware of why Knuth invented TeX in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History. It sounds to me like Knuth wanted something that wasn't just a straight up text dump of his book. If you're going to bother exporting your book to an interactive format, it makes sense to do it in such a way that it takes advantage of that format.