Well, we'll have to disagree about the clarity of the command paragraphs then. The interior sequences might be problematic, but other than complex L<>s and E<> they're easy to ignore. In plaintext, you can't represent references directly anyway; the same solutions you come up with there are likely to work for POD as simple L<>s.

I did say "in the absence of a POD parser" when I said you can read POD using a pager.

Makeshifts last the longest.