The endgame for this, IMO, is GUI tools that generate and manipulate text-based file formats. The tool Lyx does this; it's a kinda-WYSIWYG Latex editor. I'd like to see more of these, e.g. for Markdown, Graphviz, and OpenSCAD.
Anyway, I especially like the `sc` spreadsheet format and editor as an example of a GUI tool that works with text-based file formats. Despite the giant disclaimer at the top of each file saying not to edit it, it's shockingly human-friendly.