I think the problem with markdown is that it's too complex to write a good parser in a few lines of code, otherwise there would be no "open source obligations"

I think the problem with markdown is that it's too complex to write a good parser in a few lines of code, otherwise there would be no "open source obligations" issues at all, because what is really needed in a markup system is that it is widely accepted, all the rest will follow, unless the format is so complex to implement well that most of the implementations will be hacks. I also don't like how it looks from the human point of view, but this is just my opinion and I guess it's not very common as my feeling is that most people love markdown. Given that this is the standard de facto at this point I guess that what's really needed is to write an high quality, fast, simple, reference implementation written in an algol-like language (guess what? The good Haskell implementation does not qualify), and share it under a BSD license so that it will be both the specification and the reference implementation everybody will use to derivate their Python / Ruby / C / ... solid implementations of markdown. This is the perfect project to emerge in the coding community with little efforts if you are smart. It's a few days of work and it is very useful to many people, so what are you waiting for? :) Get some coffee and start coding now instead to waste all your time on hacker news! Then setup a page for your code and write a blog article explaining what are the hard part and tradeoffs about implementing markdown, and possibly how markdown could be enhanced. Don't worry, most of us understand that what you produced is FREE and will just praise you, without obligations ;)