Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document…

I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.