I agree with you and that's a negative with Asciidoc, but it uses it just for fringe features that are unnecessary most of the times and also that are completely missing in Markdown, so you can easily ignore them and this is no reason for you to be angry at Asciidoc. I wish Asciidoc was slightly simpler but nothing is perfect.

By the way, wikitext is also "English-centric" by that same criteria and you seem to like it.