You too? Yeah, I know those feels.
I don’t understand the outright need for a WYSIWYG editor. The preview pane is on my right and I can easily futz and go pedantic-crazy on my markdown formatting just the way I like it.
I have said elsewhere that Markdown adoption boils down to two things: association with the IT crowd and the tenacity against change. AKA, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and other cop-outs to say when something does the job but it could be a little bit more (or a lot more) efficient, lightweight, less work to maintain and generally easier in the long run to maintain.
The Medium style is a good option. I prefer how [Stackedit][1] does it:
Stackedit has the same Markdown buttons as Discourse, but the editing field offers some slight styling so a user knows the Markdown syntax is correct. For bold and italics it shows both outright while maintaining the raw Markdown that caused it.
Best of both worlds; a compromise.
[1]: http://stackedit.io