The genius of org mode is that the only key you need to know is TAB.
Whether it requires too much emacs affinity to be useful to the non-nerd is a point well-taken.

http://orgmode.org/

Passively accepting all this guarantees more of same.

Ah, you claim lack of difference, and dismiss everything thereafter. Fair enough: I'm not reading Joan Walsh, for example. Or the NYT, or that Senate Benghazi report.
So the challenge moves to restoring information exchange.

That would be a fun exercise. I think that capitalism is like Windows 3.1, a cooperative multitasking system. It works, as long as all applications play nice all the time and are neither nefariously nor inadvertently cheating.
John Adams was getting at this:

That is, to pluck some numbers at random, we really ought to have an 80/20 rule: 80% of our code gets things done; 20% handles exceptions, which should mostly be inadvertent. Which is why the Constitution takes >380k. If you're honest, you can be simple. If you're a river of lies, you need density to ward off the honest.
Overall, I blame Progress.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

That was not, however, written by the laboring man.

I'm waiting for you to resolve the contradiction between the impossibility of change within the system and the need to change the system.
How is it that we're clamoring for something different, then crushing every attempt to vote in anyone different? Walker (so far) hasn't sold out. I favor increasing the number of non-sellouts in DC until a tipping point is reached. Not saying it's going to be easy. However, saying it's "impossible" seems tantamount to BEING a sellout, for all practical purposes. Discuss.

Oh, they would be, would they not? But why would the peasantry be allowed to see such?

Your familiarity with hillbillies may exceed mine.

Not unlikely.

I wandered into a PhD program in Management Information Systems about a decade back. People with shelves of O'Reilly books, but a real hatred of actually coding anything. A shame.

Something like half of which are successful.

Can't a man wear a pink hat? I have this outrageous flamingo Hawaiian print.