I agree 100%
A brilliant, elegant and (now I've read it) simple idea. I cannot believe that it would be too hard to implement either.
Effective? I suppose so.
Consistent with the 21st century, modern (younger than me!) users and the way the rest of the site works? Not so sure.
The csv approach
might be acceptable if you could set up your whole page that way, i.e. materials, markup, description (inc HTML if you wish), tags, category. But for just mark-up, imo, no.
Setting up a model page is a major pain. It is in everyone's interest to facilitate the creation of data-rich, interesting, enticing shop pages which are easy to maintain.