Please keep Markdown simple as it is.

Feel free to come up with something new that supports Markdown as a subset or overlaps with Markdown.

I'm unsure of the naming & organizational conventions for Markdown. Are extensions called flavors? If so, I was envisioning a flavor.

Markdown as-is is lovely.

Not going to happen. If you look at the CommonMark discussions, you will find people adamant that X features not be included for varying reasons.

I think the best future option is going to be djot[0]. It is being created by the author of pandoc, who might possibly be the most qualified person in the world to appreciate all if the nuances of marking up text and parsing it.

[0] https://www.djot.net/

djot syntax looks just like Pandoc’s markdown. What’s the difference?

Clean slate design. I think pandoc markdown is a superset of markdown, which must parse the ambiguous parts of the spec. Djot has a goal to eliminate the corner cases and be able to represent all things without requiring the html escape hatch (eg bold text within a word).

The rationale page can do a better job than myself. https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale

Thanks, that makes sense. Although I’d like to point out that one of the listed problems with commonmark, and the problem you mention, are not problems with Pandoc markdown:

    : echo "word**withboldtext**inside" | pandoc
    <p>word<strong>withboldtext</strong>inside</p>

    : echo "a*?*b" | pandoc
    <p>a<em>?</em>b</p>

You make markdown support TeX by running it though a tex compiler. The other way around is never in a million years going to happen, because markdown is all about not adding additional markup like \commands, or extensions without which a markdown renderer wouldn't be able to generate the content it's supposed to.

(which is why markdown still doesn't officially have any maths support, only certain non-standard flavours do)