I apologyze, I sent an empty reply. :-(
Just a brief comment: there's no need of seaching for "a perfect wiki syntax", since it exists: it's the present model of well formed markup, t.i. xml.
While digging into subtler troubles from wiki syntax, t.i. difficulties in parsing it by scripts or understanding fuzzy behavior of the code, I always find a trouble coming from tha simple fact, that wiki is a markup that isn't intrinsecally well formed - it doen't respect the simple, basic rules of a well formed syntax: strict and evident rules about beginning-ending of a modifier; no mixing of attributes and content inside its "tags", t.i. templates.
In part, wiki markup can be hacked to take a step forward; I'm using more and more "well formed templates", splitted into two parts, a "starting template" and an "ending template". Just a banal example: it.source users are encouraged to use {{Centrato!l=20em}}.... text ...</div> syntax, where text - as you see - is outside the template, while the usual syntax {{Centrato|.... text ... |l=20em}} mixes tags and contents (Centrato is Italian name of "center" and l attribute states the width of centered div). I find such a trick extremely useful when parsind text, since - as follows by the use of a well-formed marckup - I can retrieve the whole text simply removing any template code and any html tag; an impossible task using the common "not well formed" syntax, where nothing tells about the nature of parameters: they only can be classified by "human understanding" of the template code.... or by the whole body of wiki parser.
Alex