I came to the same conclusion years ago and made myself and "alternate" markdown-like format that superficially looks the same, but has a grammar compatible wit

I came to the same conclusion years ago and made myself and "alternate" markdown-like format that superficially looks the same, but has a grammar compatible with parser generators like ANTLR. Took me about a week to produce something that could generate a nice document object model, and spit out HTML (or anything you please). The concept is powerful. The specific Markdown implementation however is too messy for proper tooling.