alt Hacker News> It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text.
Sure, but that's table stakes.
There are much better formats: AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, etc. Yet I also primarily use Markdown. I could use a format that's perhaps 20% better, and well-specified. But I'd have to use Markdown somewhere anyway. So I just stick with Markdown. It's good enough for me.
Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats:
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.