Comment by ddevault

What this fails to capture is the original motivation behind the design of Markdown. It was based on things people were already doing to add "markup" to plaintext things like emails. It was designed to just werk to convert your normal email-esque writing style into HTML. This article considers Markdown from the opposite perspective for which it was designed.

In other words, Markdown is not designed to be a simplified markup language for HTML. It's designed to make HTML a frontend for plaintext. The numbered lists with *., for example, would be totally unreadable in plaintext without context.