That's a fair point. PICO-8 never appealed to me for artistic expression, it's purely a programming challenge to cram as much functionality as possible into a tiny, tiny program.
My experiences with PICO-8 led me in the direction of making my own fantasy console...which then turned into a more thorough examination of computing itself.
I reached the conclusion that what I want is actually a lot of small source mediums that would cooperate well together and be bundled in arbitrary fashion as a single runtime engine, vs the "familiar computer platform but less" model that is intrinsic to the PICO-8 approach, which puts a lot of pressure on the platform to address all needs.
So I started working on that problem instead. What I have now is a binary format that might suffice as a common source document type. It's binary because it let me declare more precise meanings for the bits instead of offloading those meanings to a character parser, but it's also text-like because it doesn't enforce a lot of structure, it has notions of "lines" and "strings".
I'm now just about to where I can test it on media I might want to write and work in and see how well it edits.
