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Markdown's popularity is due to 'geek appeal', not ease of use. The masses won't appreciate it the way coders do.It's still about "ease of use", but for a particular subgroup: coders and power-users.
In another example, the casual user would prefer "search and replace" Word-style too, including lots of manual fiddling with the replacing, whereas a coder would opt to use regular expressions. That's not because regexes have some "geek appeal", that's merely using what (given your skill level) fits the job better.
It was never meant to be "mainstream" in the general way.
That said, you trying it and reverting to TinyMCE could be explained in various ways:
-- Maybe not a UNIX-style coder? Are you familiar with the command line, the UNIX way, etc?
-- Wordpress is not particularly suited for Markdown. It's a third-party option in Wordpress, whereas other systems (e.g GitHub or even Tumblr) have it as a built-in option.
-- What exactly do you find "more convenient" in TinyMCE? Blog articles are generally long stretches of text, for which Markdown is as natural as it gets. So, what exactly does TinyMCE offers you? Do you really want to see hacky, kludgy bulletpoints for your lists, as mimicked by TinyMCE (and, so easily broken)? Do you use tables and colors in your post text (resulting in equally fragile markup)? Or is pressing "B" so much better than "" for bold text?
I'm not generally against WYSIWYG, but it would have to be a no-BS, perfect editor, and no HTML editor fills that role. The markup is bad, and while you don't have to look at it, it is also fragile. Nesting things 1-2 levels (a list, a table, etc), deleting rows, moving images, end with various kind of broken result.
IIRC, the Google Docs team took a completely different approach to the normal HTML WYSIWYG widget (creating it from scratch with primitives much alike a desktop WYSIWYG app). That's probably the only one that's tolerable.