… except its link syntax. That is an abomination that had never existed and should never have existed.

What’s wrong with the link syntax and what would an alternative be?

My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it.

It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1]

[1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.

To my memory, people had been using [link](url) and similar styling for a long time on old web forums and even BBSes.

Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.