I second this. I used to write pure LaTeX by hand all the time. I feel like Markdown lets me focus more on my content than my markup, and Pandoc's version of

I second this. I used to write pure LaTeX by hand all the time. I feel like Markdown lets me focus more on my content than my markup, and Pandoc's version of Markdown has some extensions that make it easy to take advantage of the LaTeX backend (including titles and LaTeX math). Pandoc is excellent and I've yet to encounter a use case where I feel like it'd be easier to switch back to writing LaTeX.