If you are referring to the web controls used to render properties for web forms then the answer is: No, we don't plan to change this. The reason for this is that we want to generate the same html for the public site as for the editor to get as much WYSIWIG-experience as possible.

Are there plans to erradicate this extra markup in 7.5?

Web forms still render the same amount of html-elements in 7.5 (same in edit as in the view). For MVC, there will be an additional wrapping element when editing the content.

I understand the problem. But it would be great if we could control the output better. For instance where the editing attributes should be rendered.

It would also be great if we could pass custom settings to a block from the RenderSettings control, now these settings are only passed to the rendering control, not the block control. For example pass number of columns, image size and so on we want for the content area:

<EPiServer:Property PropertyName="ContentArea" runat="Server">
   <RenderSettings Columns="3" ImageSize="300" />
</EPiServer:Property>

And then in the block be able to access those settings:

public partial class MyBlockControl : BlockControlBase<SlideBlock>
{
    public int ImageSize 
    {
        get
        {
            return RenderSettings.ItemAs<int>("ImageSize");
        }
    }
}

Feedback taken. We have created a user story to look into this. It will not make it to the 7.5 release but hopefully we can improve some of the areas after the release. Except of these things we also want to make it configurable if a user control should be loaded or not when the property is null to be able to render some default markup.

I came up with an interim solution to pass custom settings to the rendering control, please see http://dodavinkeln.se/post/custom-rendering-settings.