I'm a bit of a fan of textile [0] and first came across the redcloth version[1] years ago, especially for non technical writing. In particular, it's closely aligned to the html that gets generated without all the angles. Eg. You can easily add class and/or id to a paragraph:
> Some text
p.red Some red text
It has easy to do left, centre and right alignments.
Markdown was (slightly) influenced by textile too [2]:
> While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
Too bad it's gone the way of the dodo [3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_(markup_language)
[1] http://redcloth.org/
[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[3] https://github.blog/2016-03-01-upgrading-your-textile-posts-...