If you can get past your aversion of composing content in Markdown, I strongly urge you to take a look at this lightweight open publishing tool developed by @paulhibbitts – he gave a demo and overview of it during the OEWeek Live webcasts we did for Open Education Week
I have used Docsify This for a few projects and it has very compelling features. Ask Paul for some reasons why to use it or how he sees educators (including himself) publishing course content with it