In reply to Jman.

Have you had a chance to use the Visual editor in a theme that contains a editor-style.css so that the visual editor shows you the content the way it would look as if it were published? It's very cool. Also, I also switch back and forth between Text and Visual since the Visual editor doesn't play nice with everything. But, the keyboard shortcuts in the visual editor to bold, emphasize, etc are amazing productivity boosters. Have you used those? Using Markdown in the Text editor to me is the equivalent of using keyboard shortcuts in the visual editor. Both methods are really fast.