This has also been my experience of RST: it adds a huge headache of complexity. I've also found its documentation and tooling to be very poor. Tastes may vary, but my experience was that almost every feature ended up with an obtuse name that needed a tremendous amount of searching for, the docs had inexplicable & glaring lacunae, and that the error messages that the tools omitted were infuriatingly unhelpful. Writing RST was an exercise in pain for my team. For the problem domain it was built for, Markdown works, works well, and works with few enough moving parts that you can actually figure out where your errors are, should you drop any in. This is very much not true of RST: the tools hate you with a seething, brooding hatred that will make you waste an hour trying to track down the one line in file X that's making the compiler emit a cryptic error about file Y. RST has some good ideas, but as far as I can tell, no-one involved with it takes usability seriously at all, which in turn means that they produce software artifacts that express a shrieking, gleefully sadistic hatred for the user.
