Comment by slantyyz

> markdown is opinionated.

This. If I were to guess, Gruber made Markdown to make writing for his blog easier. Then he made it available for whoever wanted to use it too, which was very nice of him.

Given how there are already multiple flavors of Markdown available that address various shortcomings, I don't know if there's a point to critiquing Gruber's original version of Markdown since it was likely created to satisfy his writing requirements first and foremost.