When you have a certain kind of mind, you tend to see "simplicity" in a way that might not be recognizable to others. I think Mr. Schwarze might be one of those

When you have a certain kind of mind, you tend to see "simplicity" in a way that might not be recognizable to others. I think Mr. Schwarze might be one of those minds, seeing his history with Free/OpenBSD. Markdown's fantastic for generating pure HTML. However, if I had a print deliverable, or any complicated function like transclusion or conditionals, I'd maybe nudge the user to try out an alternative, Asciidoc or something else. Why do I say that when you can do so many cool things with Markdown? Well, "so many cool things" is sort of the problem. You build up a unique Mkdwn/Extension/<Insert_Framework_Of_Choice/> stack every time you do a "cool thing", until eventually you're writing docs for what is, in effect, a bespoke parser. Knock out one block of that - say, like, your company's InfoSec department decides that technical writers having NPM is a Very Bad Idea - and your cool thing gets scaled back or broken outright. It's much better for your docs' lifecycle to use just the core of the spec, and not be dependent on a flurry of extensions and dependencies for the business of making docs. I don't include edge uses, where extensions excel. To take one example, Mr. Rojas' excellent WireViz program (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz). If that gets knocked out, my document still builds into PDFs. The price you pay, of course, is a more niche ecosystem; Asciidoc tooling is maybe a tenth or a fiftieth of what's dedicated to the M*kd*n Multiverse. And of course, if you're writing simple docs that go straight to HTML without so much as thinking about a print layout, then Markdown is the easy choice.