One promising camcorder I found was the
Panasonic HC-V500. I didn't research it too much, since I was already leaning away from the camcorder route.
It weighs a bit more than the compact point-and-shoot cameras, but still probably much less than a DSLR. Street price is about the same as a GoPro.
One key benefit of camcorders and point-and-shoot cameras that I forgot to mention is optical zoom!! GoPro limits you to 3 FoV settings, with some tradeoffs on image quality. With an optical-zoom camera, you can frame the image exactly how you want, and with much less tradeoff vs. noise & image fidelity.