Sounds like your major gripe with mdoc(7) is that lack of better documentation for the format and a shortage of tools to generate it. I agree on this second ite

Sounds like your major gripe with mdoc(7) is that lack of better documentation for the format and a shortage of tools to generate it. I agree on this second item, most tools don't support adding cross-references / links. At this point, markdown is 12 different standards, some of which even diverge on the most basic things like their treatment of newlines and how to wrap text. But even so, markdown provides mark-up for styles, with no semantic meaning. mdoc has macros to mark-up flags, optional flags, arguments, environment variables, files, etc. How to format this depends on the reader, and we can have much richer readers than we do right now. Simply converting man to markdown discards most of this information. A new format isn't going to help solve this; what we want is better guides and tools for produce high quality mdoc pages.