The maximally transcendental, or `most complicated', terms of gauge-theory scattering amplitudes have long been singled out, following Lipatov and collaborators, as those parts of a QCD amplitude that most closely mirror maximally supersymmetric Yang--Mills theory. We report on a programme that turns this observation into a practical computational tool. We show that the rational prefactors multiplying the highest-weight special functions of planar QCD amplitudes are governed by four-dimensional leading singularities, which can be classified and evaluated using on-shell diagrams. The resulting prefactors are manifestly conformally invariant and admit compact spinor-helicity expressions that hold for arbitrary multiplicity. Combining this input with the recently established two-loop six-particle function space, we set up a symbol bootstrap and determine, for the first time, the maximal-weight symbol of the planar two-loop six-gluon amplitude in massless QCD, first for the --++++ helicity configuration and subsequently for all MHV configurations. The answer is fixed uniquely by physical consistency conditions, requires a reduced alphabet of only 137 symbol letters, and yields as a byproduct previously unknown two-loop triple-collinear and double-soft splitting functions. We summarise the method and the results, and outline the directions they open up.