Yeah, that may be true, but it doesn’t mean that bugs (especially what appear to be simple ones) shouldn’t be fixed.
Also, Markdown doesn’t really offer any more functions, its just easy to type. Fewer functions than what the RW styled text dropdown produces, in fact. There isn’t anything in the markdown syntax that I know of that would start the list at a specific number.
What I’d really like is something that can produce more complicated, nested lists like the OP here shows without having to do all the full html code myself.