A lot of people do write in markdown but when things finally get the RFC Production Center they work with the XML directly. This can actually cause problems if

A lot of people do write in markdown but when things finally get the RFC Production Center they work with the XML directly. This can actually cause problems if you want to produce a revised RFC (jargon: a "-bis") later, because the copy edit changes are in the XML and need to be backported to the markdown. The pro move is to backport the changes during the publication cycle as part of reviewing the copy-edit changes the RPC makes.