Re: What a palaver ...
Frankly I don't know what you're getting at here. What does "Without sanitizing the environment that it executed in" actually mean? Do you really think the average writer is capable of your magnificent feat of writing a document from start to finish, endnotes etc without needing to do any editing? Word, without being anywhere near the best word processor on the market manages a more than decent decent job at a remarkably low price. vi is not a word processor, it's a basic text editor and a very good one. How do you convert footnotes into endnotes with it? How do you insert the missing full stops in 95% of the footnotes that the author forgot as happened with a recent MS that I published? There were over a thousand of them.
As I said earlier, I'll use the primitive tools you suggest when you go back to using punchcards for programming.