First up, we’re on the same page. Recovering from disaster is too often a forgotten priority, and I agree plain text is wonderful stuff.
You offer great food for thought and it occurs to me there should be points of cooperation between output format and software.
The manipulations you mention should all be easy in a proper word processor, and I would not want to use any such application without being able to recover documents without using the app.
That’s one of the things I like about Devonthink. I might lose organization but I can always snatch my documents out of a Devonthink database.
highjacking this for a min. Generally speaking is it better to save PDFs as just pdfs or PDF/A or PDF/UA? for future purposes. what are the pros and cos if any
That’s like asking, “generally speaking, is Pepsi better than Coca Cola?”. It all depends on your requirements. PDF/A is meant for archiving, so certain features of a PDF are not available (eg, all fonts must be embedded, links to external media are not allowed – afair). There should be detailed explanations available on the Net.
