I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the problem here as well, and kinda hope people expand on it, because insight might think of what to do better.
I edit a number of wikis. This leads to an inevitable amount of instances of having images floating aside the the text. Sometimes there's some peculiar stuff done with tables. But we never actually intermix the text content in a completely unreadable way, at least outside of templates and modules, which are NOT text content meant to be read in the first place and are NOT markdown either.
Every section of text only has text content, and the only alterations to the text come as syntax that strictly surrounds the affected text. If images have peculiar formatting demands, they will exist outside of text (Such as a CLR).
I wonder if Spotify was right on the money with their Techdocs approach. It's all just Markdown files being rendered in another format, and the edit button is just sends you to a github or equivalent editing page. People want the idea of a platform... but do they need one?
Well, you could get similar results by just spinning up a copy of the Wikipedia software. Their formatting language even looks enough like markdown in practice (despite appearing earlier).
I never gave rST an in-depth look. This article made me.
I am utterly disappointed.
I want markdown for writing loose text in a way that will be shared with and edited by non-technical people. If something is not formatted such that it can be placed in-line, then we're entering the real of "function" abstractions, which non-technical people DESPISE WITH A PASSION. They won't say it, but I'm old, and wise enough to know it's a mistake.
In other words, Markdown is just an expanded BB Code for me. And it does its job very well, because BB Code was insufficient.
So that's the context in which I'm disappointed with rST here. Because it look like... A poor man's LaTeX. This stuff is way too complicated for Markdown's use case, and way less complex than the demands of a book. I don't want to take the use case of LaTeX and use a worse tool. Disappointment. That's all.
I edit a number of wikis. This leads to an inevitable amount of instances of having images floating aside the the text. Sometimes there's some peculiar stuff done with tables. But we never actually intermix the text content in a completely unreadable way, at least outside of templates and modules, which are NOT text content meant to be read in the first place and are NOT markdown either.
Every section of text only has text content, and the only alterations to the text come as syntax that strictly surrounds the affected text. If images have peculiar formatting demands, they will exist outside of text (Such as a CLR).