As a master of Computer Science from some years back, I’m familiar with fighting with the ‘perfect document’, and learned some valuable lessons since then. So when reading your question with references to the “perfect document”, “define all text formatting” and just the “fighting with traditional word processors”, it triggers some of my buttons. I’ve also been an avid user of LaTeX.
Therefore I would like to address some of the main points why I’m using something like markdown for documenting nowadays:
- My main focus nowadays is not the visual appearance, but the structure and content of the document
- Markdown has a lot fewer bells and whistles for customisation down to the little details, which further enhances the focus on the actual content, and not the formatting
- In my experience, the end reader doesn’t care about stuff I spent literally days and nights to polish the font size, spacing, shifting a line a tiny amount at the top or bottom, and so on
In other words, I would rather focus on content and logical structure and order of your document, rather than the visual aspect, but you are of course free to differ. But having the need for the finer details of presentation might make markdown in general not be the optimal choice for documentation.
Regarding templates in Obsidian, you can do a lot with them, but they still mostly relates to helping you keeping the structure neat and similar, which in turn can help you later on to do restructuring or presentation based on various views and post-processing of existing data.
If you want to get to the presentation details, you might rather be looking into CSS, and/or configuration of tools like the Pandoc plugin or other export plugins you choose to use.
Sorry if this just is rambling for you, but I felt a little need to address the issue of presentation vs structure and content.