[MilStdJunkie]

The Conditional Content piece of 'component content" is one that's consistently ignored by every Big Iron vendor that I've ever talked to.

Which is 100% nuclear stupid, because, as you point out, you can't do component content without conditional content. And once you start doing conditional content, you need to have a damn good idea of what your whole product architecture looks like: what works with what, which packages are packages, obsolescence, blah blah blabbity blah. At industry conferences this makes me mad enough to spit, and all those goobers are suckering these writer teams into paying $7000 per person per (EDIT)month (!!) for a system that's going to be nothing but heartache in thirty six months.

Luckily, Asciidoc does have conditional directives, but the include directive is wayyyyy too primitive for what it's being used for right now (also as you point out). The `ainclude` directive is in extension right now, and it will probably be brought into core as a subdoc directive.

Having said that, it really is the best game in town, for generating both modern HTML alongside old-timey PDFs and DocBook XML, all from the same source.