Amaya didnt take off because it was a poor UX and there was no funding for it to compete along side the giant browsers.  Exactly as you say, editing HTML is ok for geeks, but not for normies.  The idea was for individual fields to be editable using HTTP PATCH, for example.  With a marked up view.  Remember this was 1994, so no ajax, bad tooling, barely even a DOM, no websockets.  New standards had to be made for the editor to be useful too.  What is needed is a way to edit, with user identity, such as with NIP98, so that you can control who has access.  All of these things can now be achieved.  That's what I hope to build with NosDAV, and, while still early, I think I've made quite a bit of progress.  Also I would like to put the functionality back in the browser ... one day ...

https://www.npmjs.com/package/worldwideweb