Scholarly Markdown is very much a group of like-minded people, and we had a workshop with lots of good discussions in June 2013 (http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/17/what-is-scholarly-ma...). What it has not been until the recent effort by timtylin is a specific set of tools, or spec.
Everyone seems to have an opinion on how to do this right, and that is part of the reason why the whole concept is pretty fragmented. Some of my thoughts:
Pandoc is the markdown converter that comes closest to what most people need, so I am happy to stick with it. I personally don't think that a fork is viable, things are already hard enough as it is.
Scholarly markdown is a solution for 80% of use cases, people writing math-heavy texts are probably better of sticking with Latex.
Scholarly markdown needs to be a community effort, I don't see any other way on how this can succeed
Everyone seems to have an opinion on how to do this right, and that is part of the reason why the whole concept is pretty fragmented. Some of my thoughts:
Pandoc is the markdown converter that comes closest to what most people need, so I am happy to stick with it. I personally don't think that a fork is viable, things are already hard enough as it is.
Scholarly markdown is a solution for 80% of use cases, people writing math-heavy texts are probably better of sticking with Latex.
Scholarly markdown needs to be a community effort, I don't see any other way on how this can succeed