You are right. But “markdown” — not the brand, but the concept of lightweight markup — is a work in progress still. Just look at the list of “feature requests”

You are right. But “markdown” — not the brand, but the concept of lightweight markup — is a work in progress still. Just look at the list of “feature requests” on the CommonMark forum.¹ Pandoc’s Markdown supports lots of extra features from Github Flavored Markdown (GFM), MultiMarkdown and MarkdownExtra. John MacFarlane, Pandoc’s author, is also the author of the CommonMark spec. And while, eventually, the goal is to extend the CommonMark syntax with a sufficiently broad vocabulary of content element types, the focus now is on getting the basics right, speccing the edge cases, and defining standard parser behavior. Meanwhile, there is AsciiDoc (which is a port of DocBook xml to lightweight markup), for more demanding use cases. And then there is also reStructuredText, and org-mode, etc. But the markdownish-style of syntactical sugar won the race, and while doing so, it will be the basis for a future lightweight markup language that will do indeed support not-dumbed down written content, with the full variety of nuance that offer the likes of TEI, DocBook, TeX, and will be fit to reproduce the akme of complex documents and typesetting, such as critical editions and technical manuals. Until we reach that point, I bet on dumbed-down Markdown, and while doing so, can always add-in raw html ad libitum. The bulk of most written content, after all, is just headings and plain text, with a few emphasized phrases here and there, a link, an image. That covers a lot of use cases already. ¹ http://talk.commonmark.org/c/extensions http://talk.commonmark.org/c/extensions