Besides confusing people, I'd say it's a useless feature for a couple of reasons: 1. If you insert a misnumbered item in the middle of the list then when you c

Besides confusing people, I'd say it's a useless feature for a couple of reasons: 1. If you insert a misnumbered item in the middle of the list then when you come back later to edit the text you will be confused by how the numbers in the source are different from the numbers in the formatted output. 2. There's no point in using a numbered list unless you're going to refer to the number(s) somehow. (In this case I'm using the word "couple" to introduce the list!) Markdown doesn't sort out those references for you so in practice you have to manually renumber things anyway.