I don't think markup is the answer, but having worked on quite a few cms i agree with Phil - who puts it much better than i can from around 24 mins in....
having a verbose .removeAttribute attached to any onpaste event is your friend here
I've been looking at the new Ghost platform https://ghost.org/features/ Type on the left, view on the right, simple markdown.
What I want is for things to be simple and quick.
I'm not saying the ghost option is transferable to Moodle, but a very simple text, headings, images functionality is very appealing.
-Derek
yep - i love using ghost, but the idea of teaching tutors the syntax isn't something i'd relish.
are you using https://medium.com/ ?
It has similar ideas and is a really enjoyable way of creating content.
It was a difficult proposition for some of our tutors to let go of that "i'm making a digital/word document and need to style it myself" mentality.
Interestingly thats something none of our tutors have a problem with when writing a book or article where they expect a designer to do that work for them!
At sussex we basically did a medium/evernote and stripped all the crud while making their content look beautiful so editors didn't have to.
With the new emphasis on ui and usability i'm thoroughly looking fwd to the moodle front end team moving towards an interface more like medium soon.