A report from the documentation maintainer

a) I still dream somebody would finish the lout_writer branch of docutils (https://gitlab.com/mcepl/docutils/tree/lout_writer); Lout has its many idiosyncrasies (e.g., it was created before Unicode, so it is still 8bit-based), but it is a way simpler than TeX and as much capable.

b) The other dream is somebody would take a XeTeX and make a minimal distribution of TeX just for producing PDF files with as many as possible dependencies used from system (e.g., no TeX fonts, everything from the system-wide installed TrueTypes, etc). TeX itself is not that huge, but the giant machinery around it is overcomplicated, confusing, and perhaps to large extent unnecessary.