I'm a bit of a fan of textile [0] and first came across the redcloth version[1] years ago, especially for non technical writing. In particular, it's closely aligned to the html that gets generated without all the angles. Eg. You can easily add class and/or id to a paragraph:

> Some text

p.red Some red text

It has easy to do left, centre and right alignments.

Markdown was (slightly) influenced by textile too [2]:

> While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Too bad it's gone the way of the dodo [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_(markup_language)

[1] http://redcloth.org/

[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

[3] https://github.blog/2016-03-01-upgrading-your-textile-posts-...

Indeed, Textile is slightly more intuitive and powerful than Markdown, but these days it's unaccountably Betamaxing.

And simple, helpful things like automatic list numbering are in Textile but not in canonical Markdown.