I started my blog in 2006 on blogspot. I had several frustrations with the blogspot setup, but my complaints boiled down to two things:
Perhaps blogspot allows markdown now, but even if it does, the second one trumps everything else.
More recently (like a year ago), I discovered Octopress. It’s basically a wrapper around Jekyll for building static websites with an emphasis on blogging. It solves both of my problems with blogspot, so I’m happy.