With the former, can you items of many paragraphs and other complex stuffs one sometimes need in a complex/advanced document? So you can understand why LaTeX had to go the less naive way MarkDown did.
Of course the LaTeX syntax is more capable, but for the simple and common case, it's extremely fussy. The simple case should be effortles. With markdown it is, and in Pandoc you can easily drop to more complicated syntax should you need any of its capabilities.
it works flawlessly, and it unarguably way cleaner than writing in plain latex
How can anyone
- tell me
- that this
- list
Is harder to read:
\begin{itemize}
\end{itemize}