John, although you apparently already gave up on the idea, I believe the visually very unappealing kind of problem is not solved by removing the ability to create headings, but simply by changing the CSS template or the HTML generator settings of this site to produce a less obtrusive heading look.
Currently the site defaults for using <h2> for
Headings
created by a "markdown underline" `-----` under the text, although manual formatting using HTML tags also allows for less obtrusive `
`
Headings
already - it's just that a lot of people (including myself) either do not take the trouble to use HTML tags or do not know about them. Maybe `` should simply be made the default for markdown-created headlines since the overly large font along with the huge spacings (*font-size:140%;margin-bottom:7px;line-height:1.3*) indeed break the flow of text a whole bit too much.
