I didn't mention in my comment, but I also use Markdown for all my technical documentation (READMEs) on my dozens of github OSS projects. I have lots of cross-references and I use normal links to named section anchors (sometimes that I insert manually via HTML).
It's not perfect or even ideal, by any means, but the other benefits of Markdown are more than enough to make up for the slight annoyances here.
I don't know about ReStructured text, but I can say that none of the examples in the OP swayed me that I'm missing anything of any import.
It's not perfect or even ideal, by any means, but the other benefits of Markdown are more than enough to make up for the slight annoyances here.
I don't know about ReStructured text, but I can say that none of the examples in the OP swayed me that I'm missing anything of any import.