reStructuredText is powerful, and good for big documentation, but it's complex.

Let's prefer simpler Markdown for standalone README files.

One difference: with reST we can use .. contents:: to insert a table of contents. Markdown can't do that, we would need to manually add a hardcoded table. I've not done this (but can). Instead, GitHub automatically generates a ToC; for example click the icon at https://github.com/python/bedevere:

For the badges, I added little PyPI and Python icons for the first two:

https://github.com/hugovk/cherry-picker/tree/convert-readme-to-md

What do you think of them? Maybe the PyPI one is a little unclear?