Not to be too pedantic, but RTF itself does not have this limitation. In fact on compile Scrivener does support this kind of linkage, which is how its ad hoc “table of contents” feature works, as well as cross-referencing within the text to section level elements. It could probably even extend that deeper, but it’s a bit more difficult and complicated to do that. What I’m getting at is that RTF has a bookmark feature, those can go anywhere at all, right in the middle of a word if you want, and any hyperlink can point to that bookmark. It can also as a function of being a field, extract data from that location, which is how we achieve the right half of the ToC feature, where page numbers are printed from where the bookmark is paginated to.
It’s the text engine though, that doesn’t have this. It’s a common thing in Scrivener. The text engine is a lot more simplistic than what the compiler can do, because it’s a whole lot easier to write out code that does something than it is to reinvent page layout, hyperlink functionality and so on. Footnotes are another example of something Scrivener’s text engine can’t do, but upon compile, become “real” footnotes, not inline formatting or its bespoke sidebar treatment.
It’s the actual mechanical aspect of having a link that (a) opens a whole separate physical document and (b) has the wherewithal to scroll that document to a hidden bookmark element within it, that the text engine can’t do. And if you can’t get in there and tell a hyperlink to do all of that in the first place, the rest falls apart.
I realise in getting a bit technical I’m contradicting some of my thesis above. Scrivener is a proper outliner, and the notion of writing a hundred lines of structured text into its outline is what it is all about. The notion of instead putting that hundred lines into one of its text fields of a single outline node is not what it’s all about. When I speak of “opening a physical document” here, I am speaking of the actual fact of what is on the disk. An outline node in Scrivener is up to six separate literal files, where the text field is one of those, stored in RTF format.
Yeah, it’s a good way to start a flame war too, though, so bear that in mind.