AND not a single word processor or web page building I've seen writes them clean:
I beg to differ. I've used Dreamweaver for years and while I can't speak for the latest versions, the MX version released in 2002 produced some of the cleanest (x)html I've seen. And with their tidy command you could get the code properly indented so it became easily readable. PHP/MySQL code otoh was brutally messy.