Pandoc seems to exist only to support moving from one markup language to another. And markup languages seem to proliferate when people decide to trim down the options from what they had been using. Only to build them back up to the point that a new one is formed, to trim down the options.

Which is ultimately frustrating if you ever try to go back to an old document, and realize you don't have the exact markup engine that you used back then, so that you can't actually rerender it.

Now, to be fair, often this is ok. In particular, you might not care about how it rendered before, and a minimal markdown is fine.

However, if you do care about presentation, it is maddening.