Okay, thanks @julian
This isn't ideal considering future updates, but it is a viable solution.

@agusputra I agree with your suggestion about helper buttons. The open source project Rocket Chat has an unobtrusive way of hinting basic Markdown syntax.
0_1447403857660_markdown_hint1.png
Simply a line of greyed text that becomes regular text on mouseover
0_1447403978825_markdown_hint2.png
It might be useful to have something like this at the bottom of the editor input field.

Hi,
I noticed that the category description get's too big, when the redactor plugin is used:
upload-b4843626-e37d-47d7-b305-b375eee292f4

When the redactor composer is disabled and instead the markup composer is enabled, everything looks fine:
upload-b52b8c2a-389a-42d7-ac09-8e4199e989f6

It seems that the <p> tag gets lost somewhere...

Quite Worth It
Very Nice

@baris thanks. I realised there's some issues with redactor munging the data.
When code is insered inside a <pre/> block, switching between HTML and WYSIWYG views will munge the content to HTML entitites.
You can recreate this issue on this page:
http://imperavi.com/redactor/examples/typography/

Switch to code view and add some HTML inside the <pre/> block. I entered:
<p>test</p>
Switch to WYSIWYG and back to code and it has been replaced by:

&lt;p&gt;test&lt;/p&gt;

This breaks the ability to parse that code later with syntax highlighters.

I've raised it with Imperavi.

Mystery man/woman made a pull request that we merged into the Redactor plugin:
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/6093/official-plugin-redactor-composer-now-available-in-0-7-1/

They're the first developer to make a pull request against the plugin and deserves some props! Thank you philburr! =D

Here is footage of them (or someone who looks like them, or someone that doesn't) coding:
philburr

Do you know who (on our forum) this is?
https://github.com/philburr

If you're able to contribute to the plugin please hack away 😃
The github:
https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-composer-redactor
The npm: