alt Hacker News> headers and tables should look like tables, yes, but not at the cost of removing any of the syntax characters! If you do, you’re sacrificing the whole point of the format: ease of modification.
It's the opposite, you remove the major challenge in modification- change one char and break your whole table. It type an extra backtick and now paragraphs of text are misformatted. Add/remove a column? Ha-ha, where did you get so much time to waste? Join two cells? Oh, that's too complicated
Search and replacea phrase? Impossible to find, there are formatting markers between words.
Exactly, you just confirmed how complicated, complex and varied markdown rendering is, which is exactly why it should be left to markdown applications.
The OS should be able to natively open plaintext. The joy of markdown is it still largely works in plaintext.