Well this has bugged me a lot too (I happen to find the Markdown syntax much more intuitive), and today I looked into the required changes to org.el and there's quite some work.
- There should be an
org-angle-link-re in org-make-link-regexps similar to the other link types,
- And then it would need to be plumbed down everywhere:
- into
org-any-link-re in that same function org-make-link-regexps,
- a function
org-activate-markdown-links would need to be written and plumbed down into org-set-font-lock-defaults, with further plumbing required to make the org-highlight-links work,
- And then of course, it would be testing and debugging time.
It doesn't look like one can get away with a couple of defadvices, so there would need to be a patch, that would immediately start bit-rotting unless it somehow gets accepted upstream. Which sounds like a tough sell ☹