Spoke with folks today who use markdown only for the html generation, and in some cases they were not aware that you could do expansion to inject fully formed html instead of writing it all out.

Most operating systems and text editors will support abbreviation expansion. On OSX, I think it's System Prefs > Keyboard > Text. It's well worth the time to create a couple of abbreviations when writing html.

Hopefully this neat trick can help ween yourself away from complicated site builders.