AsciiDoc is a nice project, but I think that pandoc's variant of Markdown has a lot of advantages over AsciiDoc for academic writing. Let's just compare support for math and citations, for example. Pandoc's citation support is output-format independent: you can write the citations, specify a CSL stylesheet and bibliography, and you'll get the same output in every format pandoc supports. In AsciiDoc, as I understand it, if you want automatic citation support you need to use LaTeX, and then you're limited to output in LaTeX and PDF. Similarly for math: pandoc actually converts your LaTeX math to MathML (for formats that like that) or to native Word equations (for docx); in AsciiDoc, as I understand it, your LaTeX math will work if you target LaTeX, but if you want MathML you need to put MathML in the source. If you want to target both, then maybe you need two different source documents?

I don't have much experience with AsciiDoc, but I've encountered other limitations in writing pandoc's AsciiDoc renderer. For example, I didn't see any way to include multiple paragraphs (or other block content) in an AsciiDoc footnote. That's a deal-breaker for many academics.

I also want to emphasize something that is often not mentioned in comparisons of Markdown and AsciiDoc. As John Gruber emphasizes in his Markdown documentation, Markdown emphasizes ease of reading in source format. AsciiDoc has different priorities, and it sacrifices the readability of the source document to get them. Here's an example involving nested lists, from the AsciiDoc manual:

    1. List item one.
    +
    List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an
    Indented block.
    +
    .................
    $ ls *.sh
    $ mv *.sh ~/tmp
    .................
    +
    List item continued with a third paragraph.
    
    2. List item two continued with an open block.
    +
    --
    This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
    
    a. This list is nested and does not require explicit item continuation.
    +
    This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
    
    b. List item b.
    
    This paragraph belongs to item two of the outer list.
    --

Markdown equivalent:

    1.  List item one.
    
        List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an
        Indented block.
    
            $ ls *.sh
            $ mv *.sh ~/tmp
    
        List item continued with a third paragraph.
    
    2.  List item two continued with an open block.
    
        This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
    
        1.  This list is nested and does not require explicit item continuation.
    
            This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
    
        2. List item b.
    
        This paragraph belongs to item two of the outer list.
    

Note that the AsciiDoc is at least as easy to write, perhaps easier, because you don't need to worry about indentation. But the Markdown source is more readable; the indentation makes clear the structure of the list in a way that mirrors how it would be displayed in a browser or on the page.