General comments about Markdown.

I really appreciate the time you took to respond to me. And I'm definitely more enlightened that I was before...

Instead of separate teams being responsible for each platform we support, each working on their own schedule and codebase, we've moved to feature/function area-based teams with a unified core codebase.
Glad to hear that. This has been a source of frustration at times. I welcome the effort.
We plan to narrow those gaps in the future, but they are large time-intensive projects.
I can appreciate that it is very time-intensive. I believe you will get much better user satisfaction after all the dust has settled.
We chose markdown because that accounted for the substantial volume of customer requests. E.g.:
Was this just from the most vocal users, or were you able to run a survey to see what editor features are most wanted?
I think getting the WYSIWYG going is important. I, for one, won't use Markdown in Notes until I don't have to learn a new formatting syntax that I'll rarely use.
I just tried it out and if you copy/paste the text out of 1P the formatting is lost. To me this is an issue. In Mozilla Thunderbird you can copy from Word or a browser and paste into a message and the formatting is retained (or chose to paste without formatting). This is just a quick test I ran so I'm sure there are things I've missed. This is what I'd expect from an editor today. I just tried it and formatting is not retained going the other way either.

I have a very frustrating incompatibility among platforms on the PIM app I use. In this case they introduced Tables into the desktop app, but neglected to do it on Android. And when I use bidirectional sync, the Androd wipes out the Tables on the desktop. Not cool.

But the PIM app does retain similar formatting to and from other apps, like Word.