There is no technical solution because it is not a technical problem: it is a political/institutional problem.
Not sure there is any disagreement here -- I was just trying to be kind in my choice of phraseology since it is really not clear to me what is going on re the insides of the PG technical/political/institutional "powers that be" and why they do do what they do do -- or more often why they don't do what they don't do. Not that these problems are unique to PG relative to any other NFP.
Those individuals at PG's reins /don't/ expect people to submit code to avoid the (technical) problems. All they expect is for people to submit impoverished text versions of public domain books; other formats are tolerated simply because they're so popular they cannot be ignored, but I'm sure that most of the principals at PG would prefer that /no/ alternative versions be made available.
Not clear to me anymore what the intent is of the PG impoverished text versions or what the PG impoverished text version "mission" is any more since it is clear to me that the txt70 versions don't really "preserve" a text -- for example I would think that a commercial house, if they wanted to create a new paper edition of a historical text, would want to work from the HTML, and/or maybe the txt70, PLUS a archive.org style or google books style of full page photo-digitization. So, what does it really mean then to "preserve" a book electronically nowadays? Too bad archive.org and PG haven't figured out a way to work closer to really reintegrate the PG work back into the archive.org posts, by correcting the Djvu and the PDF, for example, combining the more correct PG text with the archival images. I guess my naïve hope is that someday PG will see their mission as being to create high-quality "archival" transcriptions into reflow forms for real people to actually *read* -- people who actually care about the difference -- as opposed to say more popular efforts such as feedbooks who only care that something superficially "looks nice."
Michael Hart always believed that /no/ guidance should be provided to volunteers, because some of them would be so resentful at being told what to do that they would abandon PG altogether (I guess those that abandon PG due to /lack/ of guidance don't count). How can you overcome that legacy?
The reality is that the WWers have always provided "lots of guidance" whatever Michael thought, because, whether one agrees with the WWers or not [and I plead guilty to being one of the chief whiners] *somebody* has to play the role of the adult keeping *some* degree of "play nice" on the playground.