> What set of escapes and delimiters could be simpler? Would you rather reserve certain characters, and abandon the idea of holding "just text" values?

There's a lot of design room here.

https://www.lua.org/pil/2.4.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/172.html

I can no longer remember where I saw it (thought it was lua), but I heard the idea to use =[[ ... ]]= and =[[[ ... ]]]= as wrappers (a bit like the qq operator from perl). They can be nested and don't interfere, so =[[[ abc =[[ ]]= ]]]= is a legitimate string.