Couldn't agree with you more! Unfortunately there's no "golden accolades" in such a endeavor and even more difficulty getting it to be a community standard. Academics (especially professors) tend towards using it only if their advisor used it or another prestigious lab does. Actually having a NSF/NIH (TM) sponsored projects could help with that.

In the meantime, checkout Madoko: https://www.madoko.net -- some research folks at Microsoft basically made an extensible markdown format that compiles nicely to Latex or Word (-ish).