I also came close to proposing that idea, but held back on it, because that way, we lose the option to store a "clean" version in the database.

While the "new way" would be much more flexible, it also requires re-rendering of the format into HTML on each load from the database. I don't know how much of the re-rendering is currently done, so maybe there is no additional hit, and maybe the caching is already aggressive enough to allow this.