I agree that non-tech end-users will be the main target audience. But they are the ones who will dominantly use the visual editors with its buttons / hotkeys instead of editing markdown directly. Few of them will use the visual editor's input rules feature either (when you enter *xx* and the editor turns it to italic in place.
The ppl who use the markdown syntax directly are mostly developers, that's why I believe their opinion will have more weight.
Hmmm you might have a good point about who's actually going to directly interact with the chosen syntax. I'd be interested to see stats on that from somewhere like Wikipedia. I'm sure you're right, I just wonder to what extent.
Still, though, a wiki requires a more complex syntax with a richer feature set. Regardless of how the users interact with it, it's absolutely critical that the chosen flavor has all the features we need from the start. Once different sites and clients start doing things their own way, it can get really messy, and interoperation can take a big hit.
No idea about the statistics unfortunately. Just the fact most publishing platforms has visual editors nowadays.
Features that come to my mind right now (on top of basic features):
tables, sub-text, footnotes, math equations, images with upload and caption text, alerts ("this page needs this or that"), numbered and bullet point lists, code blocks with syntax highlighting, (block) quotes, table of contents, front matter (for homepage, author info, etc), and all the nostr stuff described in NIP-54, including wikilinks. The terminology was grabbed from here: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/markdown/
At least that's for start. I also believe that a nostr flavour markdown spec would be helpful for wide adoption and tool interoperability.
I created an article for it in tribewiki for quick listing the features: https://tribewiki.org/Markdown-fmt
