I've finally broken down and installed an html editor. However, this one is not WYSIWYG, and I love the button set I got by making a small donation to the module author. I think this is going to work out just fine.
I still have markdown enabled, and it appears to work fine if you just throw the markup into your page instead of the full html. Remember to use real lists if you want to be able to do multiple levels easily. Also, us the LI button to insert a list item into an existing list.
- first item