I don't think Jeff was trying to create a spectacle, I honestly think he's all about the community and was trying to be inclusive. What both Jeff and Gruber br

I don't think Jeff was trying to create a spectacle, I honestly think he's all about the community and was trying to be inclusive. What both Jeff and Gruber bring to the party is profile. As the article points out, there are already variants of Markdown that fix many of the problems but it would seem none of them have gained traction. If you can get the founder of StackOverflow / StackExchange and the original creator of Markdown on-board, there's a good chance that whatever you come up with will get some momentum. Specifications and test suites are all well and good but if no-one uses them what was the point? I suspect Jeff, as well as being someone with a good track record on making stuff happen, was an attempted solution to that problem.