[yannis]

One of the basic tenets of TeX and LaTeX is stability, Maths has a very long shelf life! You can TeX Knuth's papers from 30 years ago and they will still produce the same output. If I were to spend 3-5 years on writing a PhD Thesis the investment in learning LaTeX is minimal compared to the rest of the effort. With a new extended markdown markup, you will still need to learn a new syntax and LaTeX markup for example if you wanted to include TikZ code.

TeX and friends has adapted over the years through external tooling, without changes to the core, for example moving from postscript to pdf, the new engines XeLaTeX and LuaTeX. Madoko is just a preprocessor for LaTeX. If you had to finally do some changes to the LaTeX code it produces it will be very difficult as this LaTeX code is not very clean. Having said this though Madoko and similar projects are great for the LaTeX community, as an entry point to newcomers and to occassional users. It is a great Project especially as is written in Koka in itself a beautiful Project.