I've once built a system (an outliner app) that actually encodes intent, and uses a command queue ("transaction queue").

Intent could be for example to insert this new item as a first child of that other one, or to move these items to a position right before some other item, or to set font size on this item to 4.

The data structure was a tree of item objects linked via next/prev/children/parent. Automatic conflict resolution works wonderfully in this case.