I think the point is being able to then use markdown inside of that block, since many people seem to think that "**hello**"
does look better than "<b>hello</b>". That being said, it would perhaps have been better to allow for HTML tags inside the markdown that themselves can have markdown inside of them (I'm not sure if this is the default behavior of markdown or not, or whether there are any weird parsing pitfalls in allowing this).
I think that perhaps there is also a contingency of people that have been using templates for ages that have the "{% %}" style, so this is maybe attractive to those folks?
To be clear, I agree with you, but I am just trying to figure out why this syntax would be chosen.
Edit: Perhaps there is also some sort of HTML injection argument against using real tags? That is to say, if you have an interface that allows users to input markdown, then with "{% %}" you can easily filter the allowable template tags, but perhaps it is just more error prone to try to handle "<>" tags that might then themselves get inserted into live HTML. I haven't thought it all the way through but just wondering if there is a non-stylistic argument for it.
