Glad to see I am not the only one with the same thoughts! To add the the conversation, I don’t think a plain-text approach is the solution here. There is tremendous value in being able to stick to am existing standard, and veering away from it has the major disadvantage of locking one’s work out of the existing ecosystem of tools and data already built around it.
As a result, the ideal solution for me would be a plugin capable of:
- Displaying the tree in various ways directly in obsidian, and allow for navigation from there as in most existing tools today
- A custom person view panel, designed to display the card for a specific individual, with the various common fields as set edit fields
- In the above field view panel, have the general notes field render markdown + wikilinks, similarly to any other obsidian note
This should enable sticking to the existing standard and remaining compatible with the existing standard while remaining in obsidian and leveraging all the obsidian goodness at the same time.
Now as to actually going about creating such a plugin, I unfortunately don’t have the right skills, and as such hope someone more qualified could take on the challenge!