[unimpressive]

For what it's worth I thought about what I said and noticed some flaws. (Which I would correct through an edit but enough time has elapsed so that I can no longer do so.)

You mentioned pinfo, which you say still sucks. That probably IS a fault of the document format. (Which can be outputted to HTML, XML, DVI, etc, but is not itself a widely used text format.) After all, it was designed for a broken reader. And if you design something for something that's already ill designed, the end result is usually something as bad as or worse than the original article.

You also mentioned search. The thing about search is that even if the bash documentation was split into multiple parts, it's still a text file. So you could have your hypothetical man+ reader do something like:

  cat /wherever/your/docs_are_stored/* | grep '-A 100' '-e search_term'

And then let you go through the matches to find what you want.