Hello Michael,
You are certainly right that with mixed content and the example you have given here chopping does make a semantic difference.
However, you can disable this behaviour so BaseX does what you want. So the only reason I see why one should change the default behaviour would be because the default is not confirmant to some XML standard. However, I can not find any specifics in the spec about which is the expected behaviour, so in my opinion BaseX is doing nothing wrong here.
I see that this behaviour might be surprising for some users, but this might as well be the case if it were the other way round. Additionally, if we would change this now it would break application code and unless there is a good reason (i.e. BaseX is actually doing something wrong or non-compliant) I don't see why one should change the default.
So if you could point out some details as why this is not conforming behaviour, this would be interesting.
Cheers,
Dirk