@aartaka While I agree with all the criticism you express, I think this is a lost battle. Markdown appeals to the large number of people who don't care about semantics and computerized processing. It feels like just a few conventions for decorating plain text.
The problem with HTML etc. is not writing, but reading. If it were writing, we'd use Markdown as an entry shorthand, converted immediately to HTML. But nobody wants to read HTML. That's where I'd like to see some new tooling.
@khinsen
Tooling for...? Rendering HTML-serialised text as Markdown? (We already have a plethora of tools rendering HTML text as rich-text.)
Whilst I agree that the Markdown ship has sorta sailed, I still think some resistance, some search for better solutions, remains in order. It's funny how these things persist and persist until *suddenly* they don't any more.
There are good reasons why early word-processors used inline-markup schemes, but switched to wysiwyg as soon as the tech allowed.
@mikro2nd I'd like to see text editors that display HTML as rich text but switch to displaying the markup tags around the current cursor position. There are such editors for Markdown, and in my experience (mostly with the one in Glamorous Toolkit) they provide a nice compromise.