[miragecraft]

It’s an endless balancing act between easy to write (code-like) and easy to read (text-like).

Features like table is the ultimate conundrum - if you want beautiful text based tables like in reStructuredText it becomes very difficult to write and edit unless you use a specialized editor, while Asciidoc’s table syntax is very code-like and is completely unreadable as a tabular table (almost like a simplified HTML markup).

Markdown strikes a middle ground where it tries to be readable while being as easy to write by hand as possible. However in practice most people don’t bother to keep the columns aligned by hand so it still becomes quite unreadable, and you still need specialized editor to do align columns automatically if you want to retain readability.

You can consider it a good compromise or failing at both tasks (I view it as the latter).

Markdown is also wildly inconsistent - why have fenced codeblock feature with info string to set the language, when you can’t have fenced blockquote with info string to set the “cite” attribute?

I’m actually quite fond of reStructuredText but without widespread support it’s hard to justify investing into a much less portable format.