The halfway point between salting/hashing a password and storing it as plain text would be having functions that encode/decode the password.

This way you are not actually storing the actual password in the DB but just it's transformation.

Although if you are gonna take this step you might as well do the salting/hashing so some rogue programmer doesn't steal your functions.

The nice thing about salting/hashing is that even the guys running the site don't know what the password is.