> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...

I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.

After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.

That is true, modern HTML is also (from what I heard!) hard to parse.