I use reST daily agree that reST itself a bit too complicated; it would be much better to have a conceptually simpler syntax, closer to that of Markdown. Also,

I use reST daily agree that reST itself a bit too complicated; it would be much better to have a conceptually simpler syntax, closer to that of Markdown. Also, some of their syntax choices look too artificial for a plain text format. Yet for me reST is a clear winner, because it's extensible; it's relatively easy to a) write your own directives, substitution directives, and text roles and b) hook into the parser. For example, in my workflow I only use their parser with a few of my own extensions and only to get the parsed text as XML; once I got this, I continue with XSLT to transform it into what I need. (I use Python and lxml with my own extensions to XSLT as well, so I can, for example, manipulate files and update a whole directory tree right from XSLT.) I think most of these tools would benefit if their parser was a separate component that could save the resulting tree into XML. (It would be ideal to have a configurable parser where you can tinker with the grammar.)