I agree that ReST is needlessly complicated. But Markdown isn't really that much better. Maybe it's because I'm more used to Wikipedia-style link syntax. As for bullets: Since some Markdown implementations annoyingly insist on four spaces, while others work fine without that, I'd say it's about even.

But these are all minor annoying details of either. The win of ReST is standardized extensions for anything. The win of Markdown is there's half an implementation running anywhere.