Slashing in the English language, and the parsing issue.

Sometimes the english language just makes me want to tear it apart and put it back together again.  And it's not even the irregular verbs and exceptions that irritate me the most.  More often than not it's the little things.  But little things lead to big things.

Take the slash.  Often defined as a forward slash used to separate alternatives or grouped items (!) it's generally considered good practice to not use spaces unless the items you're separating themselves contain spaces.  So "good/bad", but "good / rather bad".  How the hell is a reader supposed to identify the groups being slashed?  It's a parsing nightmare.

This is the part where I say I've avoided writing "(good) / (rather bad)" so far, but admit that I don't know how much longer I can hold out.
Of course, this just leads to further questions, such as

• Does 'good' really need to be parenthesised given that it's a single word?  I'd argue on the grounds of including the parentheses on the grounds of symmetry.
• Should there be spaces surrounding the slash, given that we've reduced the multi-word item 'rather bad' down to the single parenthesised item '(rather bad)'?  I have no strong feelings one way or the other here.
• What happens if I need to slash-separate a pair of parentheses and a group of words?  Or perhaps worse, a single opening/closing parenthesis and a group of words?  How does one read (() / (other mismatched punctuation)?

And before you know it we're onto grouping, sentence structure, syntax and whitespacing.

Yet I have no problem dropping caps on proper nouns...