By profession, career, and interest, I'm a software developer, at this point mainly working web applications (Rails, React, and GraphQL at this point).

I'm also a content creator, as in I write documentation, blog posts, produce images, and so on, for both myself and for work.

When I'm doing the latter, especially writing, I find it difficult to create content with markup embedded in it, so I write text almost exclusively in plain text, with a little markdown added (you know, how markdown is the markup we already know because we've been writing email this way for years).

I'm also aware that walls of text, even though interspersed with headings at different levels, a few bulleted lists, etc, can still be inaccessible without more semantic structural markup.

The markdown processors I'm familiar with (kramdown in particular) do a wonderful job of letting you intersperse HTML markup within the stream of markdown, so you can surround things with semantic markup. This works pretty well, in fact.

And yet, I think I'm looking for something even more intuitive that can be indicated swiftly without my needing to think about it while creating and editing the content in it's more free text form.

Perhaps there really need to be 2 steps to this process of preparing content for consumption.

What have you found? How do you work with content to get it to final form? I'm interested in your processes, tools you've found, ways of working, etc.