Ignores newlines as well, so just as annoying as markdown to me.

Why are almost all of those light formatters removing your line breaks? Everytime someone mentions some markdown variant (and there are many of them!) and I look up the syntax description, it shows that newlines are being ignored.

If it's trying to be plain text, at least behave like plain text, and don't remove newlines in a shopping list like this (just like hacker news also does with its comments):

-eggs -milk -flour -water

BBCode has it right.

Maybe djot is better... I'm sure it is in a lot of ways.

But one of the key features of Markdown (and, indeed, most tech such as programming langauges) is the ubiquity. It's really hard to overcome the fact that almost every platform can export/import markdown.

Markdown has lots of syntax from irc/email that folks have been using for decades. The popularity is also due this, it was partially a refinement rather than invented.

This is also why the parsing ambiguity/backtracking ends up occurring - humans can read plaintext and do pattern matching with context/attention whereas parsing algorithms have a hard time.