I've only played with it after finally giving up on using org files for source that others will read and ending up with markdown/pandoc/laTeX workflows, so I may be commenting from ignorance of its use cases. However, AsciiDoc felt a bit like methadone for WYSIWYG addicts---a useful tool to wean someone away from obsessive control of the minutiae of layout while writing toward unentangling the task and allowing the machine (possibly assisted by an editor/layout specialist) to deal with that stuff while the writer...well, writes.
That said, there's probably a huge niche for that, and if it improves adoption of markdown-like text formats, I'm in. I'm tired of having to explain to colleagues that no, that is my original, and yeah, the syntax is really obvious and no, no you don't have to learn LaTeX, here's my style files, no, honest you just have to run a script, hell, just throw your files in the share on my server, it'll email you the results, but, oh, for the, yeah, yeah, I'll get you a bloody Word version.
That said, there's probably a huge niche for that, and if it improves adoption of markdown-like text formats, I'm in. I'm tired of having to explain to colleagues that no, that is my original, and yeah, the syntax is really obvious and no, no you don't have to learn LaTeX, here's my style files, no, honest you just have to run a script, hell, just throw your files in the share on my server, it'll email you the results, but, oh, for the, yeah, yeah, I'll get you a bloody Word version.