Markdown doesn't require tag closure, and eliminates the <p> tag entirely. This makes for a cleaner and faster composing experience.
I did little but wruite in HTML from the late 1990s to mid 2010s. Markdown is my preferred route now.
Also conversant in LaTeX, formerly; nroff, DocBook, WP4.2, Wordstar (both with 'reveal codes' capabilities), and probably more. Pandoc is a game-changer.
Well-formed HTML5 needs closure though, no? Hrm ... ok, looks like specs are far looser than I'd thought.
h[1-6], li, blockquote, pre, can all be specified via an opening-only syntax.
p, ul, ol, and dl can be omitted entirely.
Arguably anchors require closure, but the syntax is still briefer than HTML. Images likewise.
Header, footer, and aside don't exist (they can be supplied in a template). article, div, and span are also ignored.
Italic, bold, strikeout, code, subscript, and superscript require a lightweight closure, and are actually the main cause of grief in my Markup writing.
Tables are hugely more sane.
And footnotes automajickally exist. Swoon!
It's not that HTML is foreign or annoying to me. It's just .... more frictional.
And I have all kinds of nice words to say for HTML5. The base spec is quite good.
Is there a WYSIWYG simple editor for creating documents in HTML5? Something that's basically wordpad and produces pages that actually look the same on different browsers? Documentation for my projects is currently in raw ASCII because I couldn't find a satisfactory solution.
If you edit html inside a modern editor it colorizes the output in a useful way. You see the headings, and the basic formatting in a rather clear way. For simple html (as the one you would expect from markdown conversion) this is more than enough.
WYSIWYG editors are evil as they mostly produce crap code, good news are you don't need a WYSIWYG editor with markdown as it's very easy for [almost] everybody to write by hand.