MultiMarkdown only creates plain text

Thanks for sharing the format!

And yes, I would say in general that unless you are writing using pure Markdown-only in Scrivener—such that you could copy and paste the contents of your editor into Sublime Text or Typora with zero loss of formatting—then styles are going to be your best friend all around. Not only can they do basic things like italics, if you prefer that to just typing in the asterisks—they will let you do some stuff that is otherwise very cumbersome without a system like Scrivener on top of Markdown.