When you think you can learn a job (technical writer) by doing it bad rather than not doing it at all, you just take bad habits.
Serious technical documentation are structured. Pictures have captions, graphs have legends... It is cumbersome, it requires more data but that is the price to communicate (wait for it) INFORMATION to other humans.
Yes, writing structured documentation that can be easily used is part of what information technologies are. Structuring information from data.
Information is still analogic at the end and rst is just a typesetting chain designed for a domain specific kind of documents called technical documentation.
I am totally biased. I love readthedocs, I love POD, man pages, ISO documentations, IETF RFC, ASM papers, all kind of scientific papers, useful instructions that can help me do my job faster by following well known practices to be consistently readable without strain. And rst for this level of requirement is less a PITA than doing it conscientiously by hand or with markdown.
But I agree, I totally love the artistic freedom of markdown for writings too. But in a Museum, or as grafitis.
We talk about documentations right? Not art? So the title is accurate.