In the meantime I plan to push forward with the markup approach we've got. The editorial content should still work if we find a better markup answer, and I'm willing to do the work of replacing the markup as long as somebody else figures out what it should be.
I am following this thread as a frequent documentation user.
While table 9.5 with functions looks quite nice, I quite dislike 9.4 with operators. Previously, I could lookup operator in the leftmost column and read on. Right now I have to look through the whole table (well, not really, but still) to find the operator.
