[hobos_delight]

It wasn't a point upgrade - Confluence 4.0 got rid of markdown in favour of an "XHTML" storage format, then a layer on the editor to autocomplete markdown into the rich-text as you typed.

Personally I preferred the ability to edit pages as markdown, and we toyed with ways to allow users to edit the rich pages in markdown (i.e. a new transformer from the storage format to wiki-markup, instead of the editor format) - but it wasn't possible to not come up with a diverging solution for the transformations here (at the time, given the time we had spent on it).

Whilst we copped a lot of flack from the die-hard Confluence users when this was done, the vast majority of users liked the change. Also from a different angle, this was a really fun time at Atlassian - we had run out of space in the CornX (office at the time) so we had leased the floors above the pub next door (The Dundee Arms), and there were five of us in there, all with out machines crammed around a single table in this tiny room. Good times.

[kstrauser]

It was a death knell for us. We moved all our documentation into Git, which the devs found more convenient and usable. I think there might’ve been some survival bias: the people who kept using it after the breaking change liked it. The people who dropped it immediately because it ruined their workflows just moved on (or put it in read-only mode).

[hobos_delight]

Oh completely agree regarding the survival bias - I think the over-arching plan was to make it more accessible to more than just dev teams, and it seems to have worked. "Like MS Word" was thrown around a bit.