Jack, in principle I agree with you, though some of your wording is likely to be misunderstood by those newbies for whom you intended it.

Rewriting an existing large score in ABC, or in any other notation system, is very hard work, and error-prone. Anyone who claims to make no errors is either a liar or never tried the task. The makeshift I described above helped me greatly in terms of workload and quality. For NWC users, Stewart's method seems to be easier still.

"Lossless": not really, as you well know.

Also, ABC is not designed to exploit the full potential of MIDI. MusicXML does it to a higher percentage, so that those of us who want perfect notation and subtle MIDI output are best off with MuseScore etc.

Each format has its pros and cons. We all agree that ABC is a good idea for posting to Mudcat.