Is this all a design shortcoming or oversight, or an utter necessity of the structure of WeBWorK?
Neither, it's a design "feature". As others have said, it is to make it possible to handle the different display modes. Certainly other approaches are possible. One is used by the prototype PGML processor, which is viewed as an alternative to the BEGIN_TEXT/END_TEXT approach to generating the text of a problem.
See
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/cervone_course/PGML?login_practice_user=true
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/cervone_course/PGML-examples/?login_practice_user=true
http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/SampleProblem4
http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/PGLabs
for more information.
Davide
WeBWorK Main Forum
How get special chars in text?
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