[prawks]

As much as I agree to your dislike of XML as very unwieldy, LaTeX does have \begin and \end directives for environments.

Definitely agree that at a per-paragraph level that's way too much markup.

[scott_s]

That's the thing, though: environments are not the norm.

I'm writing a document. I want the default text entry to be that document. There's already a lot of noise in my Latex sources; I want less, not more. (And I recognize that we actually agree on this.)