Comment by Linux-Fan

I don't think anybody needs all of the features at once but people have different preferences. E.g. I typically do well without bold formatting (I only need one level of emphasis which is served well by italic) but I want tables, links and lists very often.

Also I like the WYSIWYG feature of Markdown where it has an advantage over the traditional Markup languages like HTML, LaTeX, groff etc. of being easier to read in the text file. Dedicated syntax highlighting can go a long way to make markup easier to read, though.