https://unixdigest.com/articles/come-full-circle-back-to-html.html
Reading this a couple of years ago persuaded me to stop writing for my website with Markdown. I had been dissatisfied with the limitatons of Markdown for a while; even with Pandoc’s extensions one could only generate a subset of HTML with it and had to fill the gaps by embedding raw HTML. So, I figured, why not just write HTML?
I find myself limited by markdown sometimes, too. It’s great when all I want to do is write some text, but struggles for any pages more complex than that. At least with Hugo I can still use html for some pages or create shortcodes for use within markdown. It’s definitely overengineered a bit since I end up coding for Hugo rather than the browser, but it works for me, at least for the time being.
I’ve got shortcodes for raw HTML, too, without hugo. I just use sed for replacing single variables, hxincl for partials, or m4 macros for more complicated stuff involving variables.
If I were really smart I’d just use PHP instead of little UNIX tools. Might get a job that way. LOL
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i’m certainly feeling the squeeze here too with markdown. my latest code jam entry had a handful of tables, which are miserable to produce with markdown.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I really think that Markdown is a worse is better technology. It makes some things easier, but at the cost of making everything else harder. One of my someday projects is a WYSIWYG editor for web sites that understands and integrates with semantic HTML and CSS so that you can get all the power without having to (always) directly edit the underlying markup. But no idea if I’ll ever get around to it 
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I’m having a terrible time getting proper sidenotes to work with my Markdown-based site and I’m thinking I should just go all in and write everything in HTML from now on.
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