I thank the author for explaining their reasoning. I still disagree, but I appreciated reading the argument. Apart from the ugliness of the syntax from a devex

I thank the author for explaining their reasoning. I still disagree, but I appreciated reading the argument. Apart from the ugliness of the syntax from a devex perspective, I think one of the big advantages of Markdown is that it's highly readable even without being interpreted, which rST is not. So if you have a markdown document and no markdown interpreter, an average person can still make more or less perfect sense of the contents, including the hierarchy and emphasis.