Hi John,
Let me declare at the outset that I have contributed a few minor patches to Asciidoc and respond to some mailing list queries and I am using it within a Python project, so I am not an unbiased observer. :-)
Sphinx utilizes reST and the docutils tools under the covers. BTW, all the [official Python docs] are written in reST and processed using [Sphinx].
Yes, thats where I saw it but didn't investigate further
Asciidoc seems to have a pretty nice default html output style (looks like [git uses it] for some of their docs). Sphinx has [some themes] available. With Pandoc, you'd have to come up with some basic styling of your own.
Yes, and see also http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html#X6
That list includes whole books, in fact Asciidoc is one of the formats O'Reilly (you know, publishers of slim volumes on computing topics) accepts.
Git, Waf, Pacman, Cherokee are some users that list members might know about. Asciidoc was designed for documents, not extracting docstrings from code so the focus and toolset is different. The newsletter is a document not code.
These days, I find Markdown (with the Pandoc enhancements) to be the nicest looking and easiest to use markup of everything I've seen (ex., reST, moin-style, Textile, asciidoc, not to mention Perl Pod, LaTeX, Texinfo, and others). IMO, the easier it is to write and read as plain text, the less trouble you'll have finding people to write and update content, and the more you yourself will enjoy writing.
And of course I say all that about Asciidoc markup :-).
In the end there isn't that much in the source formats of all the lightweight markup languages, it comes to personal taste. I just wish there were more converters, the concepts are mostly the same but the syntaxes always differ in details. And hand conversion is a pain.
The thing that differentiates for me is documentation and tools.
Asciidoc is reasonably well documented, many queries get answers including pointers to the manual. I got turned off markdown when the website displayed as a 100mm strip down the centre of my widescreen monitor, poor advertisement.
Since Asciidoc goes through docbook it has the benefit of two PDF backends, dblatex and fop and all the well tested XSLT to generate other XML forms, eg XHTML, HTML epub, manpages etc. and Asciidoc provides the a2x wrapper that runs the whole chain rather than dumping you with an intermediate file and leaving it all up to you.
And I happen to like the way its implemented as a parser driven by config files and backends driven by config files all of which cascade like CSS, so you only have to write the one line you want to change, not copy the whole config file.
But as I am not likely to contribute a lot to the newsletter I won't try to influence (much ;-) the guys who do.
Cheers Lex