Markdown is devalued as a format because of the bizarre shortage of Markdown VIEWERS. You find Markdown documents in every open-source project, and you always wind up viewing them with all the embedded formatting characters. Why?

Why provide documentation in a format that is so poorly supported by READERS? Or, to respect the chicken-&-egg problem here: Why is there such a shortage of Markdown viewers?

Every time this comes up, respondents always cite this or that EDITOR that has Markdown "preview." NO. We're not editing the documentation; we're just reading it. So why do we have to load the document into an editor and then invoke a "preview" of it? Consider how nonsensical the term "preview" is in that case: What are we "previewing" its appearance in, given the dearth of Markdown readers?