This ^

It's a people problem, not a tech problem. I love writing in markdown because when I write, my mind works differently than when I code.

Ideally I could do anything that sort of feels right and the computer will just figure it out.

Markdown is the closest to that^ that I've ever used. It gets out of my way, which is what I want from a tool.

The lack of pure fancy spec is a feature

There are some cases where it fails, and those are ones where it makes no sense from a plain text perspective: two spaces at the end of line for a line break, and the image syntax (especially when you want the image as a link).