Yeah, this is a pretty good overview of the situation as it stands now.
BUT somehow I think I found a solution for myself in the hour since I posted it, AsciiDoc seems rad as hell. Very Markdown-like but geared more towards document writing and conversion to other “publishable” formats with features like automatic ToCs, citations, character conversion to more “literary” equivalents like emdash and more proper quotation marks, etc., just more complete in general where Markdown is for quick n’ dirty comments and forum posts. I’m super glad that I found it. Apparently some O’Riley books were written in it.