> Chicken and egg. There are very few if any machine parseable PDFs out there, so there is little demand for such.

No, the egg has been laid for quite some time. There's just not enough chicken. Almost every place I've worked at has complained about the parsability of PDF files until I showed them LibreOffice's PDF export feature, that supports PDF/A (arciveable), PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility), and embedding the original .odt file in the PDF itself. That combo format has saved so many people so much headache, I don't know why it is not more widely known.