Ivo-
You only get ugly hacks if you don't think about your code before implementing something.
True. Go ahead, do a rewrite and show us how much better you can do with text files. Or if you don't want to do that yet, try loading all of the English Wikipedia (CUR and OLD) into MoinMoin and then try to mirror MediaWiki's functionality in MoinMoin.
Really, this is not the place for philosophical discussions. Show us the code, please.
Regards,
Erik