[eschwartz]

The conversion pipeline actually does a lot more changes than necessary to format-shift, since it disambiguates styles and fixes some device-specific bugs.

Directly opening a DOCX or HTML in the Editor, for example, does a much more direct "conversion" to EPUB.
Mainly because Conversion is meant for end-users, to get the book onto the device as fast as possible, whereas the Editor is designed for people who care about the book internals and/or want to fine-tune the look and feel of the book.

Any such feature would never be implemented for Conversion, but could, arguably, be implemented as a tool or import mode for the Editor.

...

Rather than inventing an IMHO over-engineered styles wizard, I think most people who clean up ebooks use personal collections of regular expressions to find common patterns. Which can handle more types of fixes.

Is there anything that you feel could be done more easily than by using a regular expression (and possibly a python replacement macro)?