Hi Raymond,
Having said that, are there any rules of thumb or best practices that
will allow me to keep most of my content easy to read while still making
use of all the great functionality available?
Very good question. I think at the moment, there aren't any written best practices, that deal with your concern. .. So there's a chance to create them ;)
IMO it depends very much on which TW features you use within your text. If you happily mix eg: list widgets with your "normal" content it can get messy very fast.
So in my opinion, if you use stuff like eg:
<$list filter="[tag[myListABC]sort[title]]">
<<currentTiddler>>
{{||$:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/tags}}
</$list>
imo it would be better to create your own global macros. eg:
<<myList tag:myListABC>>
which makes it more readable, but may not make much sense for a reader of the plain text, because you still need TW to render the list.
.... So imo one advice could be: "Use macros, to make your text more readable"
... to be continued ...
-mario