"Verbose" seems to be a trade-off for removal of intrinsic ambiguity (and the resulting standard wars) within markdown, which I speculate as the reason we still

"Verbose" seems to be a trade-off for removal of intrinsic ambiguity (and the resulting standard wars) within markdown, which I speculate as the reason we still haven't come up with one "standard markdown" despite many calling for it. IMHO this took minimal yet established markups from various wiki and markdown-ish syntaxes, further simplified them, finally approaching what we wanted as a "standard markdown" in the first place.