> An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.

For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).

This is great! Not an emacs user (as yet) but this and org-mode's /italic/ _underline_ *bold* +strike+ feel that much closer to the oft-touted "source looks kinda like formatting” ideal of markdown. Not sure why we ended up with the mediocre version as a defacto standard.