Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today.

Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools.

I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)