Markdown is 'lighter' and aimed at the more general case: churning out lightly-formatted text quickly, with as few 'rules' as possible, with page layout concerns addressed by templates defined elsewhere.
reStructuredText is 'heavier' and only really an improvement over Markdown if you're trying to embed page layout into the text. Which fewer people are.
You are right. I think I prefer reST because it produces documents. It's not a quick way to add markup, it's a quick way to structure a document (and provide links, sections, inline code etc).
reStructuredText is 'heavier' and only really an improvement over Markdown if you're trying to embed page layout into the text. Which fewer people are.