Does anyone else think the complexity of the markup is an explanation declining editorship?

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:May 2011 Update

Yes, any mature article will be absolutely littered with templates, infoboxes and tables and even more obscure stuff even I don't understand. It is too much to expect anyone new, with the exception of vandals, to have the confidence to edit something they cannot comprehend. I note the OP complains of the double and triple apostrophe markup. In fact this was introduced to make wiki-markup simpler than html. If it had just stopped there, or continued with the principle of only introducing markup for simplification we would not have a problem now. Spinningspark 10:24, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Spinningspark‎10:24, 8 May 2011

Yeah, it's ironic that WP markup was originally intended to make HTML simpler. (But what possessed someone to use the *same* character for bold and italic is beyond me...)

One simple usability win, maybe, would be a simple option to hide all templates, citations, and infoboxes. Couldn't this be done without too much drastic software development? In Javascript, even?

Babbage‎23:50, 9 May 2011
 
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