[chrismorgan]

\(…\) and \[…\] would not be without problems in Markdown either, as backslash is used for escaping, and there are situations where square brackets and parentheses require escaping.

As a simple example, if you want to write something in literal square brackets, you can normally just write […], but if there’s a link target with a matching name or you’re in an environment that may introduce a link target with a matching name (e.g. rustdoc will see [Foo] and try to find an item to link it to), you may choose to write \[…\] instead. You only need to escape one of the square brackets, but if you’ve escaped both.