To be fair, he was asking nicely - begging even! RST and Sphinx are "industry standard". Markdown isn't really a standard at all, nobody uses the plain version

To be fair, he was asking nicely - begging even! RST and Sphinx are "industry standard". Markdown isn't really a standard at all, nobody uses the plain version, everybody uses informal extensions. I think starting out with Markdown is fine and if it becomes unmanageable, one can still migrate to RST.