I have come to the conclusion there are two kinds of audience and two kinds of diagram, abs they almost exactly overlap

1. Engineering diagrams, explaining concepts to other engineers who are using the diagram as a jumping off point to deeper explorations

2. "Business" diagrams - the sort of thing we want to see in a Medium article or presentation. The style and correct placement matters far more than engineering.

The first is very amenable to markdown style production - often we want to spend no more than a few minutes creating the diagram. We get (60?) 80% of the way there with 20% effort.

But with every markdown approach I have tried the remaining 20% is flat out days of work. There is almost always a need to place that box there and have this one below and to the right and dammit the layout engine will not agree.

What I would ideally like is a combo - markdown to get me most of the way there, and then drop into some vector format that lets me tweak.