The issue with Markdown is the syntax is pretty horrible. To create a link, it's [ title ] ( url ), which is incredibly unintuitive. I'm still never sure if italics are or * *. Heck, if I want a single newline, that's not possible. I am all for using a markup syntax; I just wish we had a better option than Markdown specifically.

Additionally, Medium is specifically, heavily concerned with "how it looks" as that is one of the main selling points of the blog software.

A single newline is possible, and it's the most horrible thing in Markdown:

   When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown,
   you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p

Agreed. It's an appalling kludge, and I bet most of these ``distraction-free writing environments'' (vomit) don't highlight the extra trailing spaces in any way.

I have the following in my .vimrc which at least makes them visible:

  set listchars=tab:»\ ,eol:¬,trail:·

Of course, having them visible doesn't change the fact that they're an appalling kludge and I still tend to use <br /> instead.

reStructuredText is another option. It is quite powerful, but the syntax is little complex compared to Markdown.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

Silly question: shouldn't be piss-simple to write with whatever syntax you like and parse it to markdown, with tools like Python?

Indeed, I'd write it more formally as "Markdown lets you focus on the content and structure of your work, with no thought to it's appearance."

For me, this is huge. I take all my notes for all my classes (save classes that require odd symbols such as math) in markdown, because by it's nature it guides my notes into a very nicely structured format. Once I have my content and structure, I can build differently styled documents for all of my different use cases: viewing my notes on kindle, reading them on computer, or printing them.

Markdown's really powerful, and I love using it.

"I don't know of any other system that allows this except just plain text."

How about any WYSIWYG editor? The simplest syntax is no syntax.