Hi Walter,
I appreciate the feedback. This was the simplest way to achieve the desired end user experience to not have that "start a new session" link, rather than guide people through editing the HTML directly.
APM has both "basic" and "advanced" customization that are sort of mashed together. Essentially the pages are read from the templates OR the Advanced Customization (it replaces the templates if configured), and text-replacements are done from Basic Customization into the predefined areas in the template. It is certainly possible to replace the templates with Advanced Customization to put whatever HTML you prefer. Then the hacky HTML comment tags could be replaced with a more sensible solution.
If you have any feedback about desired customization features, or what would work well for your site, we'd love to hear it. In our experience, it seems that few APM administrators have the desire and/or capability to hand the APM pages off to a Web Dev team to make changes. This greatly reduces the overall utility of Advanced Customization, even though it can be used to accomplish essentially anything.