This article, and many of the comments here, seem to be written from the perspective of someone who would never think to read the "source code" for a document i

This article, and many of the comments here, seem to be written from the perspective of someone who would never think to read the "source code" for a document in the original text format and thinks that the transformed document is the only one they should be looking at. And for those folks, sure, markdown sucks. But some of us still view source code as primary and want to "use" the docs in the same context we use when "editing" the docs. Frankly I'm enough of a curmudgeon that I view the whole conceit of markdown (that it was a concession to the "pretty formatted docs" people that was acceptable to us README dinosaurs) as a step too far. Nothing short of writing docs in proprietary WYSIWYG editors will ever be enough for those folks, and we shouldn't have tried.