I'm glad to hear you would have found it beneficial!

I've definitely seen the same patterns at companies (and even introduced similar patterns).

The proposal linking was inspired both by IETF RFCs and by Jira issues. I love how both systems provide semantic meanings to such links (X obsoletes Y).

I do hope to marry the engineering love of markdown with management's love of WYSIWYG. Currently the proposal editing process is done via a syntax-highlighted markdown editor but in the future I'll add a WYSIWYG editor, then let users select a default mode.