Many science publishers archive XML for the long haul - how can markdown address this? Strictly by transforming to NLM at the end of authoring?
We suspect markdown will be more human readable than Word in 100 years
Is WYSIWYG or some flavor of that essential to adoption?
We believe that a strong percentage of smart authors will need to see a visual representation of their writing in order to be comfortable in an authoring environment, so yes.
But a good thing about markdown is that formatting is not at all a consideration.
One of the problems of a WYSIWYG editor is about copy/paste from Word. Either allow only plain text paste or you have to clean it up. WYSIHTML5 does a good job with copy/paste from Word.
Bottom line: We have not solved this issue, but what we do know is:
The more you move towards an editor that will hide the Markdown, the less it makes sense to use Markdown in the first place.
Ideally, for whatever format the industry adopts, it must be a simple thing, possible to pick up the basic functionality immediately and intuitively, and learn the advanced features over time.