Short version? With a pile of XML docs, Asciidoc's DocBook XML backend represented the "Legacy Tail" or Lenny Effect (Lenny Tail?) that gave us some insurance w

Short version? With a pile of XML docs, Asciidoc's DocBook XML backend represented the "Legacy Tail" or Lenny Effect (Lenny Tail?) that gave us some insurance we'd have a stable format. We didn't see that in the Markdown ecosystem - we would have had to pick and choose Markdown variants and extensions, anyway - and the ReStructuredText ecosystem had no such tail and too many Python/Sphinx dependencies (corporate infosec had a real chip on its shoulder about Python). There was a lot of nights and weekends spent prototyping and wrestling with various old aero/milspec formats, but at the end of the day we came out with a publications format that could do more than the original could, on common tooling, where everyone who wanted to could contribute. I put it in the "win" column.