Personally I find Markdown extremely inconsistent and hard to use. I find it much easier to just use a subset of HTML. It's also much easier that way to just slap a stylesheet on it and make it look nice.

Are images [img.jpg(alt text)] or (img.jpg[alt text])? I forgot. <img src="img.jpg" alt="text"> is way easier to remember. Is it ''bold'' '''italic''' or "bold" 'italic' or 'bold' ''italic''? <b>bold</b> <i>italic</i> is MUCH more intuitive.