Indeed. And even a large number of habituated authors have gravitated towards markdown, despite the rather klunky workflow of MD -> XML -> TXT.
Like Stewart says, learning Kramdown is very easy. And https://xml2rfc.tools.ietf.org/experimental.html really simplifies the toolchain as well - just use the topmost blue box to choose your input file, and then select "kramdown" rather than "xm2rfc". This will directly convert your Kramdown source to text, HTML, or PDF without an XML intermediate step. You can have the result in a frame (for debugging your file) or saved to a file.
Cheers,
Andy
