Agreed. I grieve that the WordPerfect approach to word processing got displaced by the MS Word approach.
Markdown is another story. Even something as simple as replacing /slashes/ or _underscores_ with italics is a piece of special-case syntax to learn. Just now, I needed literal underscores instead of italics, so it took a few experiments to find out how to do that. I found out that backslash is the escape character. Or maybe it’s not, if I write a\b\c\d it isn’t. The syntax is just so very, very complicated.
Such is the nature of DWIM: you set out to create something simple and automatic and free of rules, and end up with more rules than you can count.
I don’t fit into either of those groups.