[StephenGL]

Adam I completely agree. Markdown is fantastic at something. That something is non-complex documents. What has happened since is that techies have taken that non-complex use case for the tech and made the logical leap that it is somehow a leas complex tool for complex cases. In other words "average users will understand this". The average user likely will for the most basic case and then will be thrust upon a poorly standardized, often needlessly complex hash of a markup extension set for anything more complex. All of this energy at the expense of HTML gaining more users and or web based WYSIWYGs being refined to the point of awesomeness.