@doriantaylor sounds like a good minimization of tech dependencies, I think we align on principles there.
I have found XSLT hard to “come back to”, e.g. maintaining @H2VX, compared to PHP. #microformats2 is a good alternative to RDFa. v2 syntax has vocabulary independence (and a well defined and tested parsing specification) with the ability to create & use your own custom terms, but simpler, prefixing like HTML5’s "data-*" attributes without worrying about explicit URL based namespaces and fragile qnames.
We can likely do even better. Good to see multiple approaches to the principles of simpler setup & maintenance, plenty of learning opportunities I’m sure.