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That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.

That "convention" is one of the only standards-compliant ways to delimit URLs. Fix your copy-and-paste mechanism.

Read closer.

"The characters '<' and '>' are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text".

The RFC itself uses "<URL:...>" because it already uses "<...>" for BNF non-terminals, which are much more common than URLs in the RFC.

Enjoy your undeserved upvote :)