An idea to improve this: How about the following - it requires an extra piece of markup, but it would still I think simplify matters for newbies:
Create an extra piece of markup, or maybe a template, with the following effect (I will choose ((..)) as my markup, probably not ideal, but if there is interest in it, we can think of something better):
Starting from a page:
blablabla {{some ingenious but complicated template}} blablabla
we change to:
blablabla ((template|{{some ingenious but complicated template}})) blablabla
This has no effect on the page as it is shown normally, but when one checks the edit page, one sees:
blablabla ((template)) blablabla
and below the edit field there is a second edit field, with a header 'template:' and content
{{some ingenious but complicated template}}
That's section editing on steroids - I like it. There is probably a lot of work needed refining the idea, but the basic concept is good. A way to separate articles into sections other than just with headers would be very powerful - it would allow edit links on infoboxes, etc., it would allow users to edit a section of text without editing the templates that just happen to be in that section too, and probably more that I can't think of right now. The idea is definitely worth a full discussion.