The table rendering issues I suspect are from the lack of a newline after the headers. I don't know whether it's correct or not because, yknow, markdown.
reStructuredText is at least consistent. And extensible. And secure. It has a decent spec, as well. It’s just a pity that it never gained widespread acceptance or other implementations and is thus effectively tied to Python.
I like reStructuredText and work in it regularly. I’m sad that Markdown with all its terrible inconsistency, lack of extensibility, insecurity, &c. has prevailed.
The reasons why Markdown is popular are I think very similar to why HTML is popular. In its first years, it was loosely specced, very liberal in what it accepted and was parsed differently by different implementations (browsers).
When this actually became a real problem, HTML5 came out to spec it much more rigorously.
RST in that picture is XHTML. Rigorous spec, but very picky with the input. Typo? Your whole document won't render.
I've been bitten by XHTML and I've been bitten by RST. The experiences are very similar. I agree with the need for a more rigorous spec but like with HTML it still needs to be liberal with its input.
So that's what we need, and I just hope it doesn't take years to come into existence. An HTML5 for markdown. And we shall call it MD5!
The table rendering issues I suspect are from the lack of a newline after the headers. I don't know whether it's correct or not because, yknow, markdown.
Still better than rst. :)