I don't know if you're already familiar, but pandoc perfectly bridges this gap for me. You can write things in markdown, then covert it latex no problem with pandoc. You can even make templates for it, and write mathmode in markdown.
It certainly makes for less _noisy_ source files in my opinion, and it also means that you get to take advantage of the fact that, if you want to, you can easily convert your markdown to HTML, with maths using something like mathjax.
This was a bit of a ramble, but I honestly can't say enough nice things about pandoc.
As an aside: I guess the fact that k only uses symbols makes it a very inclusive language :)