Is Markdown still it

I have been using Markdown for over a decade in all kinds of projects and also for note-taking. It’s far from being niche anymore in software development and computing circles. I do forget image and link syntax often but since I use wikilinks in most of my notes that’s not a big problem.

Still, I feel we come to end of the Markdown-era. Let’s try to collect some requirements or a wishlist for “Markdown2”:

• Stay close to plain plaintext: We want to keep it light on the clutter so that the cruft doesn’t obscure reading the actual text of the file even when you don’t have a render at hand.
• Extensions instead of flavors: Having to remember quirks of Markdown flavors leads to all kinds of issues. Could we just have a ‘base’ markdown2 and then have extensions?
• Frontmatter is ugly. Metadata the first thing you pop into your eye is distracting and ugly. I don’t have a solution here. Sidecars and metadata DBs seem too decoupled and will get forgotten when copied. Maybe just keep metadata out of text files all together?

What are you missing? Is orgdown or gemtext the answer?