Thank you, Bod! #2 should be fairly easy, depending on how we want the new menu to look / work. I don't recall there being any discussion about this, however. At one point, I started working on a "mobile" version of the site (see Development of PerlMonks "Mobile" is now open for business), and this would have a js-powered pull-down menu in place of the static 'bar' at the top. Further development stalled due to lack of - er - "resources".

To address the need behind #1, I started working on a feature whereby users can post in markdown (or, potentially, any other markup language, e.g. bbcode, POD) and the system would automatically convert it to perlmonks markup. See Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally. However, work stalled; see here.