[sashametro]

One of the nice things about Markdown and reStructuredText is that there is actually a substantial overlap in their markup formatting - it is not too difficult to write documents in the common subset, e.g. this brief guide that I wrote up documenting the common subset: http://gist.github.com/1855764 (you can see the same file interpreted as Markdown and reStructuredText there).

My biggest complaint with the various lightweight/plaintext markup formats is the sheer variety and incompatibility of their markup syntax. Pandoc goes a long way to being able to convert the more popular ones easily, but it would have been nice if there had not been so much gratuitous re-invention of the wheel. It's kind of sad that the MultiMarkdown table format is incompatible with the tables in reStructuredText.