"But I don’t want to go among nerds,” HN user catalogia remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all nerds here. I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd.” “How do you know I’m a nerd?” said they. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Don't get me wrong, I like and use pandoc. But it's not the sort of tool anybody should expect the average author to be aware of. Maybe if it had a GUI it'd be more reasonable to expect the general public to use it.

well, it's text-editor based and scores of people worked with similar systems successfully without being a nerd before Microsoft and IBM started to push for WYSIWIG because you could sell a new UI for that every year or two (and now the same people are selling SaaS because people stopped taking the bait...). Efficiency gains for actual users: noone knows, but people are making a lot of money, so it has to be something.