[falcolas]

Part of the problem is that the period is overloaded. Massively overloaded. And not in a BNF (or other regular syntax) style that makes sentence breaks mechanically identifiable.

Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.

[nerdponx]

This raises an interesting consideration for typesetting engines like TeX. Maybe we should only use the full stop character for sentence breaks, and to typeset initialisms use a directive like \initials{USA}. This also allows the style/template to determine whether (or not) to intercalate the initials with full stop characters when typesetting the document.