we want our ABC tunes, with one or more voices/staves, to give rise to correct sheet music ready for playing correctly (not for publishing), and to matching software-generated sound (not beautiful, but correct). At the moment, not even abc2midi and abcm2ps - both integrated in ABCExplorer - agree about the interpretation of ABC - a disaster unrelated to typesetting subtleties.

It was caused precisely by "typesetting subtleties". Gonzato's soi-disant "standard" threw in a load of stuff which is easy to translate into squiggles on a page and impossible for any player program to use. He completely ignored any suggestions for compromises that could be implemented both as notation and as sound files.