Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense and all (I'm a huge python guy) but... why? RST is a pretty god damn awful format. Markdown lacks a proper standard but that's really the only problem with it... I wish the python community would just adopt Markdown for good and stop trying so hard with rst.
I've wondered about the same question, and I also personally greatly prefer markdown. I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown. Thus RST was more mature than Markdown at the time when Python documentation was a disaster zone and people were looking around for technology on which to build Sphinx. So I think RST versus Markdown for Python is more or less a "h…
That's true: According to Wikipedia RST is from 2002 (so is AsciiDoc), Markdown from 2004. Perhaps also important though is that RST was introduced as a direct successor to StructuredText, which apparently, had some currency in the Python community previously.