I agree that syntax transformations are in the wheelhouse of ML-family languages, but this just makes the absence of any popular tools besides pandoc more striking.
But yes, I do agree that the ML family is pretty barren, at least in terms of publicly-available software.
It is, perhaps, the "functional programming" of functional programming! (as in, FP is already a couple orders of magnitude less popular than OOP/procedural, ML is definitely less popular than, say, Lisp)
