Fair enough, I’m looking at this from the point of view of a developer. As far as I know, this is not one of the things you can configure in pandoc, hence my use of “break” and mentioning that the citation libraries would need to be patched. The output being a PDF means that unless we patch pandoc, those (???) are not removable.
We agree there! These are indeed all hypotheticals since we’re just discussing the idea, I just thought I’d point out that this could cause conflicts in case you wanted to consider other symbols. Mutually exclusive might be the way to go if @people is a must.