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Bob, I've got a couple problems with the situation as you lay it out.
In the first place, a number of your "fancy format" formats are really just HTML under the covers anyway, so the amount extra that they bring to the table isn't much.
And then, second, a major reason for their being on the "less compatible" end of the spectrum has nothing whatsoever to do with their complexity/capability and everything to do with proprietary thinking.
If you think about the Open Office document format that has recently been accepted as an ISO standard (and before that as an OASIS specification), it would fall way to the right on the complexity/capability spectrum but, being fully open, has the potential to be all the way on the left in terms of interoperability and acceptance.
One thing that I think you want to include as a factor in complexity is not merely the formatting capabilities, but the metadata that an arbitrary XML file can contain. If, for instance, every company name in my history of Wall Street is indicated by <company> tags, then it's easy to search and locate the instances when I'm looking for Charles Schwab the company and not Charles Schwab the person.
If we think of e-books as being designed for current publishing, then markup of metadata seems less significant. But what if every piece of business communication shared the same markup as the e-books? What if the e-reader wasn't an e-book reader, but instead a tool optimized for reading anything and everything we have to read on-screen?
I think in that case that fancier formats, or more complex formats, would be so much more useful that they would become the de facto standard and thus widely accepted in many applications.
Roger Sperberg
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