@Alexis:
Just to chip into the choir:
Lack of markdown is a showstopper for us here at Things in Flow too.
I’ve just spent 2 days evaluating a full switch to Asana for a most of our systems (task management, lead management (CRM) and team productivity etc.) just to end up concluding that Asana could do anything we needed – except support consistent text markup!
(I apparently simply couldn’t imagine that a mature and popular task management system like Asana didn’t didn’t support that – so I didn’t even think of checking that as the first thing in my research…)
All of your major competitors that we know of and use regularly supports markdown: Trello, Jira, Assembla, Trac… etc. Really can’t understand why Asana don’t. The only other “professional level” feature I’ve noticed that you’re missing is ticket numbering – which we as a small company can currently live without (but I think it should be an option to turn it on anyway).
If you still need convincing then try watching this Google Trend graph for the term “Markdown”:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=markdown
As you can see markdown isn’t a shortlived fad that will go away anytime soon – on the contrary it’s an integral part of the major “content as code” megatrend, that is coming to all kinds of professional services these years.
So in our opinion you really, really, really should support markdown as soon as possibly in order to stay relevant in the professional commuity.
PS
Our primary use for markdown is the ability to make the descriptions more easily readable by adding titles and subtitles (#, ##, …), lists (*), code snippets (``) and links in a consistent and non-guessy way. Especially the ability to specify links is important as just a couple of bloated gDoc-links will totally destroy the readability of any description. Links are also important in order to support non-http protocol links (like evernote:// and trello:// or even message: ) – which are very important if you want to create an efficient mobile workflow etc.