Yeah they missed an opportunity to more fully support something more like markdown that offered in-line links and basic text formatting. Missing tables is also quite the deal breaker for a bunch of things.

But yeah it seems like these lack of features is a willful and highly-opinionated approach to what the author of the protocol wants to take a stance on (their excuse is ease of implementation for clients, but I think it is a more of a deliberate choice). That's fine. It's their protocol and they can do what they want with it, but I think they missed an opportunity for it to take off.

Various people since have suggested we just settle on HTML 4 (with no scripting) and we'd be way better off and I agree.