[matthewflatt]

On the subject of tools: I'd like to clarify that Scribble was not designed to solve academic text-formatting problems; it was designed for Racket documentation. It's fair to say that we subsequently improved Scribble in academic-friendly paper- and book-writing directions, but like so much of what the current Racket developers do, it was motivated by programmer experience rather than academic tasks or credit. The current developers can only work so fast, but I hope Racket continues to attract more contributors who build more tools.

On the topic of parentheses and submodules: I can understand why some consider parentheses to be an obstacle, but I'm puzzled that you've singled out their use for submodules. Syntactic forms in `#lang racket` use parentheses, and I think they've worked well in practice for submodules. That said, submodules are most powerful when you don't use them directly and instead use (or create) constructs that are implemented as submodules. For the example you have in mind, a new syntactic form may well fit better --- and maybe should be one of the many constructs that are available out of the box.