The text that comes out of the game is "owned" by the combat team and not the UI, if that makes any sense. The chat windows are essentially listening to notices that say "display this text". The text is colored and added to the chat list, we (being the UI) don't do special processing of the text.
The short answer is that it would be up to the combat team to do some of the things that you're looking for: begin/end combat, timestamping, reformatting of the combat messages, etc. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's generally not a function of the UI.
I can think of two things to follow up on: posting on the official boards or filing a bug/feature request in the game.
-P
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