Wow, lots of "sound and fury ...".
Here's one of the original notations I proposed for Smalltalk-71-2, but which never got implemented. The idea was that you could use open and close parens if you wanted, but if you alternatively wished to "indent and line up" you <cr>ed before you closed the paren and the left one would be converted into a "gray line" (on a one bit map screen it would alternate black and white dots vertically to appear gray). This vertical line was the height of the leading so it would connect up with the indent at the same level on subsequent lines. Each new <cr> would continue the vertical line. Typing a right paren would terminate this indenting level. The basic observation here was that we would be working on a computer after all, and hence really didn't have to imitate the typewriter slavishly. The computer should be able to create formats that really work for reading that might not have anything to do with long strings of text ...
Another observation and suggestion. Observation: Squeak/Smalltalk is not likely to spread to "the millions" unless it has a readable and inviting look to it. And "the millions" here includes other programmers. The two syntaxes most likely to succeed are "C-like" (which I just couldn't abide), or "scriptlike" (which could actually work). I don't think Python is a very good syntax for OOP, but good scripting syntaxes for real OOP languages have been done (c.f. CodeWorks). Suggestion: turn all the energy worrying about formatting Smalltalk-80 conventions into good ideas for making real OOP inviting to look at and we can make these happen right from the parse tree ....
Cheers to all,
Alan