Ahhhh, and your points are some of the reasons I started the new thread to address the future of the algebra filter.
I have been sifting through moodle forums and docs and found quite a few requests for details of syntax, but moodle docs offer nothing. One poster inquired if the filter was even supported anymore....
As I said, I don't want to break anything, and I would like to see math notation and display completely transparent, but.... that doesn't mean we should not look at how such a vision informs the decisions of how we get there. ;=}
I think a major issue facing us is the breadth of notational choices, and a big plus in my book for dragmath is that it can produce text expressions in multiple mathematical languages. It is technology like that (and similarly the ability of asciimathml) that will most effectively promote use of math notation in moodle and online (as Mauno and I have mentioned while wolfram uses it's own notation system, their impact is potentially much greater now with WA coming.)
I for one would love to see a plugin based universal translater that would pull symbol libraries based on parsed tokens resulting in one filter but support of many languages.... And I would like to keep moving towards mathml.
So I again invite algebra filter users to use the thread I created to further the discussion and documentation of algebra filter features so that intelligent decisions can be made