Often the link description is the most important thing, and may make sense without the link, so I'm not sure how well that would work.

To me putting the link first is extremely counter-intuitive, as if writing plain text I'd also be more likely to write out a description of what I'm referencing first, and then enclosing the link in parentheses.

Thankfully with Markdown that makes it easier to remember - the URL part is as it always was, and I just need to mark which part of the text makes up the description.