Hi Kerry,
Thanks for the comments. I hope that Leila will respond. I have a few thoughts:
1. Have you tried the New WikiText Editor (NWTE, which I want to call NEWT so that it's easily pronounceable), particularly on talk pages? I think that new users will find it to be considerably easier to use than "pure" wikimarkup.
2. I agree with the sentiment about VE on talk pages. Perhaps you could ask the WMF folks if there has been further thought about enabling VE on talk pages. The last time that I asked the answer was "no" and the evolutionary paths for talk pages are planned to be NWTE/NEWT and Flow.
3. I agree that more mentoring of newbies would be good, but there is finite human resource capacity among the more experienced editors and those editors already have plenty of work. The Wiki Ed Foundation and other organizations are increasingly providing paid staff time to mentor Wikimedians, and I think that this is a more realistic option than lecturing the existing volunteer community that we should be doing yet more work for free. WMF has plenty of money and it seems to me that spending some of that money on training and mentoring programs is probably worthwhile.
Pine