Yes, this is a long-term project.
One suggestion I've made is to add some additional syntactic sugar for
templates. Something like:
{{>Template}}
foo
{{<Template}}
which would pass all the content between {{>Template}} and {{<Template}} as
a single parameter. This would work around all the splitting/escape issues
and allow us to rewrite {{table-start}} / {{table-end}} template pairs as
{{>table}} / {{<table}} -- ie, minimal changes to to the wikitext would be
required, but the result would be a properly nested template invocation.
(This idea is stolen from
http://handlebarsjs.com/ .)
This is still highly speculative, but I'm interested in discussion.
--scott