Asciidoc definitely seemed like the best option. The biggest thing for me was the ability to do complex numbered headers.
Unfortunately the tooling wasn’t really good enough for my use case. I needed a clean way to move between Asciidoc and Word, and it wasn’t really possible. Pandoc claimed support for both Asciidoc and word, but it was only partial and couldn’t round-Trip the document. I considered developing & contributing the functionality, but I didn’t know the language the tool was written in and couldn’t justify investing more time in the experiment.
Maybe it’s time to review the tooling situation and take another crack at it...