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

I love MediaWiki's syntax. But, I've been using it for years. And I'm a crotchety grognard who loves plain text and hates GUI editors. At least one friend, someone with a Master's in CS, declared that while they'd like to edit Wikipedia a little, they don't feel it's worth their time to learn the syntax. (This might not be a problem by itself, but they perceive Wikipedia as more than a little hostile, but that's a different thread.)

Theory: A high quality GUI editor would help. Of course, it's going to need to be able to handle MediaWiki's complexity, or at least elegantly "punt," simply rendering particularly complex things and limiting GUI editing to "delete or leave alone."

Do you love it because of the fact that you know how powerful it is given that you've learned it, or do you love it because you think the "design" of the markup itself is beautiful? I actually admit to finding the devious ins and outs of Mediawiki syntax fun, myself. But I think that's because I'm so neck-deep in using it after all these years. Noobs definitely don't feel this way upon first encountering the syntax -- they think their browser threw up.