I used to write raw HTML for my blog because I needed more formatting and structural power than what Markdown could provide for Jekyll. Then I built my own little blog generator that uses Markdown and which pre-substitutes my own hacky syntax elements for the extras I need.

And this is what Markdown is for: its just enough above plain text such that you can get at least 95% of what you need for a blog post, whilst still have the source be easy to type and proof read.