Short answer: no.
In reStructuredText, it would be impossible to unambigously mark up and parse lists without blank lines before and after. Deeply nested lists may look ugly with so many blank lines, but it's a price we pay for unambiguous markup. Some other plaintext markup systems do not require blank lines in nested lists, but they have to compromise somehow, either accepting ambiguity or requiring extra complexity. For example, Epytext does not require blank lines around lists, but it does require that lists be indented and that ambiguous cases be escaped.