Sigh...
There's nothing "hard" about it. It's just a pointless pain in the keester, for no good reason, to have to put in paragraph tags on all my grafs if I want to add any HTML at all, and it introduces an opportunity to introduce more errors.
Why make us do it? That's what computers are for.
sigh... <rolleyes>
I guess I don't care if you get your <em> pablum as-long-as the rest of us don't lose all the html coding to trade down.
Lists, formating, tables, etc. and the html character entities, which it looks like you use also, these are things I and others use all the time.
Since I use them automatically when I write, the simplistic code you suggest is redundant and useless to me.