But you're the one who brought tables up? How does limiting to prose help? These are basic fails in simple tables used in prose all the time
> A lot of that is covered by
Almost none of this is, hence the examples.
> markdown without any syntax highlighting
The opposite, syntax highlighting is the only saving grace.
> it should be obvious as soon as you type it due to changed highlighting
Do you know that people copy and paste sometimes? Your "obvious" becomes a needle search operation to find which symbol broke it. Or it may be hidden in the middle of a page.
> Regex handles that pretty trivially
How? Write your trivial regex to exclude arbitrary html markup between words. Start with a simple example of a bold word with multiple maker types, extend into adding color and maybe a tag? Then estimate how many 0.0x% of users in the bright future of universal md support would know what regex is.
> I’ve also never run into the need to replace a phrase that is sometimes partially marked up — seems niche?
That's unfortunately a common issue - people with very primitive document editing experiences where broken search is a non issue suggesting their workflows for the masses