As someone who came to emacs and org-mode after using Markdown on Github for quite a while as "the default readme format", it's a consolation to find that Github supports "pretty" formatting of org-mode: https://gist.github.com/Trevoke/667a02bfbe464c1b9011 

Org-mode is significantly more powerful and nicer than markdown. I think that is part of its problem. Look at Daniel's TODO list on the implementation of org-mode syntax for Sublime Text: https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode/blob/master/messages/install.org#features

Another way of looking at it is that markdown is just a subset of org-mode anyway... :)

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 2:17 PM Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:

On 2015-10-25, at 16:55, Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2015-10-25 at 07:12, John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>> Interesting. One day I imagine something like this, or sharelatex
>> exists for collaborating on org-files with people who don't like
>> Emacs...
>
> One can hope, but unfortunately it seems Markdown is the default implementation for people supporting a simple markup language.

Yes.  Sometimes I wish Org-mode used Markdown by default.  Then, I start
to think "yes, fine, but /which/ Markdown?", and I feel better;-).

(The problem with Markdown seems to be that there is no "official"
version.  Also, if Org-mode were tied to some external standard, Org's
own development - like in "adding new features" - would become
problematic.)

>   -k.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University