Agreed, is it possible to implement this as a hack ontop of the chrome's own dev tools? That all just implemented in html/css/js. Maybe you could override that.
Sounds super hard to me, but what you built looks super hard too :)
That's a really good question, one that I spent a lot of time thinking about before I started. Basically the way that they deal with changes to the page is fundamentally not suited to persisting the changes back to text. It would take a lot of hacking :)