I think the explicitness is the one aspect which has been widely well-received. We all know the pain of an inexplicit Markdown, and CM did a fantastic job of ad

I think the explicitness is the one aspect which has been widely well-received. We all know the pain of an inexplicit Markdown, and CM did a fantastic job of addressing that. Much of the frustration, at least from my eyes, is because CM attempts to incorporate too much of the mess that Md once introduced. I understand they did this in the interest of keeping compatibility with most "Markdown" documents. But they had the opportunity to fix things up, and really I wish they did. The quintessential example here is the inclusion of HTML. By allowing html to be mixed in, Gruber really allowed a lot of flexibility and versatility, but that only makes sense if the content could be trusted and that it will only ever appear on the web. Tables are a great example of reasonable html usage- they are supported in both Md and CM. There are a lot more examples of unreasonable HTML usage, which I'd rather not enumerate. These days, with the proliferation of Md as a widespread content language for public discussion across mediums, HTML doesn't belong. There are other cruft and ambiguities that CM could have cleaned up easily. CommonMark had the chance to improve this situation, but they went to great lengths to embrace it. If they had considered themselves as a distinct dialect instead of "the" standard, they may have gone a different route and written something more modern and clear.