>but because it doesn't look the way you thought it _would_ look,
you don't recognize that it's exactly what you were looking for...

I reject it not only because its ugly, doesn’t have any decent tools to support it, isn’t supported or advocated by anyone world-wide except an army of one, and will not be used by the other volunteers in any case, but more importantly because I find cases on a daily basis cases of things I need to encode as a transcriber where I say “well obviously there would be no good way to address *this* issue using Bowerbird’s scheme.”  And then, having established one has to transcribe into an ugly format, which I certainly think html, xml, and TEI are also, one comes rapidly to the conclusion that there is no way that an input transcription format and an output rendered file format *ought* to be one and the same thing because to do so needlessly subjects the end reader to unnecessary ugliness. Not to mention that PG is rendering to 80 different output file formats in any case so why *insist* that there be only one input transcription format “holy grail” in the first place?