As a big advocate of Asciidoc myself, I have to say this sounds backwards to me too.
I can't imagine someone calling themselves a developer finding writing asciidoc difficult. It isn't any harder than markdown. It only has a slightly different syntax[0], and more features.
I've also faced a lot of resistance from people when asking them to migrate from markdown. My, unfavorable, opinion is that it's simply the usual reluctance to change and unwillingness to learn something new, deal with the short term pain of learning, despite longer term advantages.
* The ordered list isn't the best way to write numbered lists. Numbered lists can be: 1. 1. 1., etc. The computer will auto-increment.
* Typographic quotes are an extension. I wrote KeenQuotes[0] to solve the quote curling problem and integrated it into KeenWrite[1].
* Document header. I fundamentally disagree with putting formatting instructions into plain text documents, in either AsciiDoc or Markdown. I wrote KeenWrite to completely separate the two. Documents are typeset using ConTeXt[2] and a theme[3].
* Admonitions. Pandoc (and KeenWrite) supports annotations in Markdown. I used them on page 5 of my Impacts Project[4] to insert the spectra. I'd say that annotations are more flexible than admonitions because admonitions are often canned (TIP, WARNING, etc.); whereas, annotations are user-defined.
* Sidebars and block titles imply presentation. These are also handled by annotations.
* Includes. You can use R Markdown to get includes. Or write an extension. Fair point that it isn't bundled, though.
* Custom CSS. Again, avoid mixing presentation and content. Specific presentation logic can be applied by annotating the content, rather than trying to format plain text as though it was HTML.
* Definition lists. Supported by Markdown, I use them for a glossary in a novel I'm writing.
* Tables. While perhaps not CommonMark, basic tables are widely supported by almost all Markdown implementations.
There's a fair amount of incorrect, biased, or outdated information on that page.
Here's an example page written in Markdown and made into a PDF:
With that architecture, the source document format doesn't matter. Take any input document, transform it into a structured document format (such as XML), and then typeset it. Pandoc has a similar architecture.
I can't imagine someone calling themselves a developer finding writing asciidoc difficult. It isn't any harder than markdown. It only has a slightly different syntax[0], and more features.
I've also faced a lot of resistance from people when asking them to migrate from markdown. My, unfavorable, opinion is that it's simply the usual reluctance to change and unwillingness to learn something new, deal with the short term pain of learning, despite longer term advantages.
[0]: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...