Hey, you reminded me, I once experimented with pandoc's conversion script- you can write a lua script that handles the different markdown styles - to just output escape sequences for different colors or bold/italics depending on the header level, so that you could just translate the markdown into something prettier in your shell.

Your approach is more sensible, I had fun playing with the lua script though. Pandoc will spit out a reference script that formats the output as html so it it pretty easy to work off of