Ask HN: Why is Markdown so difficult to work with?

I find it's inconsistent across services at best, and a complete pain at worst.

Github is one of the few places that render it beautifully. There are a few services that do this, but they never work with each other. They all decided to add their own niche things to it, completely breaking compatibility.

Also, has anyone ever tried to export markdown to a more portable format? If you're extremely lucky, your PDF will have only a few rendering faults and your HTML, nah allow talking about the HTML.

I mean it's a really elegant thing in itself, I just wish it'd play well outside of Github's walled garden.

Has anyone else come across any of these problems? How did you solve them?