Why I prefer rST to markdown

reStructuredText (rST) offers significant advantages over Markdown for complex documentation projects through its extensible directive system and abstract document tree representation. Unlike Markdown's lightweight HTML mapping, rST allows custom directives, pre-render transformations, and sophisticated cross-referencing. The author demonstrates this with a custom exercise extension that dynamically moves solutions to different document sections based on output format. While rST has steeper learning curves and uglier syntax, it provides the power needed for advanced documentation workflows that simple Markdown cannot handle.