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

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:May 2011 Update

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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