The tension between structural vs. in-line editing is the tension between professionals whose work product will be reused vs. non-professionals whose work product is short-lived. Professionals are willing to pay the price of disciplined editing because they will earn its benefits; normal end-users will not earn any benefits, so disciplined editing is a waste of time for them.
There's no sense in trying to make one tool suitable for both audiences, the use cases -- and more importantly, the time-value propositions -- are simply too different.
So, when someone is participating on a long-lived documentation project, they must use the professional tools and workflows. That may mean normal end-users must first learn how to edit in a disciplined way. So be it, that's a price everyone pays.
What doesn't make sense is to go on letting non-professional writers use informal editing tools like Word to contribute to a formal process. That way lies insanity and double the work to undo embedded styling and to re-apply semantic tags. Better to do that kind of work intentionally , from the very beginning.
But what also doesn't make sense is to insist that informal writing be done using a formal toolchain. Let Word, Google Docs and its ilk take care of all those use cases.
TLDR: use the right tool for the job.
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