Going by what the MS Word integration provides, would first-class integration also involve generating a bibliography section in the markdown file itself?
Because I’m assuming all other functionality it provides, including auto-completion can be accomplished via the .bib/CSL file alone. This makes it agnostic of reference manager as well.
But then as in some of the replies in the Zotero thread, plain-text notetaking and Document preparation are 2 separate steps, pandoc being the converter between them, handling citation styles and the like. I do understand your idea of a (graphical) UX but do you see it feasible in Obsidian given that we can’t have block level access (it is but a .md file), hence can’t give access to specific areas of text to the plugin, like the other integrations? I see both the points mentioned by the dev are fundamentally violated by the plaintext philosophy of Obsidian. Zettlr’s UX in that sense is reasonable, though also plaintext, it has graphical export options which call pandoc and other command-line utilities in the background.