Well yes - this would kind of be an either or situation... If you want your info/docs on the workspace then you just use text and not markdown (or just "read around" the markdown tags - after all that is why it was invented). And of course you don't need to tick the tick box (default is off, and it is per group) - so your 50 lines are safe.
The OP didn't want to have to open the info sidebar so presumably can put up with less well formatted info in the sidebar as they never look at it 
The "above the line" feature would be a nice addition though and shouldn't be all that hard to add? It is quite a common approach to these things. 
Fundamental to improving flow documentation is how we can view it.
If we wish, we can create rich documentation for flows, groups and nodes:
I don't think that the information bit of the sidebar is adequate to view it:
Nor is the node editor, even after the three clicks to get to it:
So how should the documentation be presented?
so how do you document (with diagrams) a traditional code program ? Probably word/powerpoint or MS project etc... often a separate app... fundamentally Node-RED is a flow designer / runtime - and has been mentioned - should be self documenting... (IE readable flows) - but yes there will often/always be more required, so at least we do have places to add the info - so it can travel with the application. Diagrams are always going to compete for screen real-estate. I don't think there is an easy answer.
Well if you mean me specifically, my preferred code editor (vi) doesn't really do graphics so I don't have an answer.
I can imagine a Node-red sidebar - the explorer - showing flows, expanding to the groups and nodes within them.
The "has description" icon displays alongside each documented element.
Clicking the icon opens a more or less full page view of the formatted documentation, with next/previous buttons.
Thus one could browse through the documentation available for a flow.
Clicking the same icon on a node in the editor should do the same.
Yes - I think it was mentioned a while back that it would be good if clicking the "has Docs" icon opened a preview directly rather than the info editor.
Meanwhile - the PR above is aimed more at the OP request for more info on the page.
Agree with both views here I think.
The current views don't cater for complex documentation, nor do I believe they should do.
However, as we are exploring this idea of flow documentation, there is indeed something missing. It is more complex, I believe, than the existing UI, but not beyond us!
In the development I've done over the last decade, I came to really like the simplicity and flexibility of Docsify as a tool to document things. But because Node-RED is already a web server, we can be rather more clever but at the same time keep things simple.
Why not have a standard where we use ~/.node-red/flow-docs/ as a documentation repository? (Would need to be under the projects folder when using projects of course).
Then we can use the existing Node-RED admin web server to deliver any markdown documents in that folder (and sub-folders) as flow documentation on ./flow-docs/ (with the admin prefix of course, if used).
For simplicity, the flow-docs folder could be made a docsify root. Which wouldn't really need anything adding to node-red core other than maybe including docsify in node-red's dependencies so that it would work offline. Though it would probably be sensible for node-red to provision the folder and populate it with a docsify index.html and a _sidebar.md file.
Alternatively, the existing node-red instance of marked and mermaid could be utilised with a simple auto-catalogue or some such. There are ExpressJS middleware packages that will do this for us. Though I suspect that just writing something ourselves wouldn't be hard.
Actually, I think this could even be a plugin if we didn't want it in core.
By the way, this thread prompted me to bring to the top of my backlog a UIBUILDER feature that I'd been meaning to work on for ages.
Namely a node that very simply defines a url and a server folder path pointing to a collection of markdown files. It mounts the URL just like a uibuilder node instance but without all of the extra's.
In other words, it will become (not there yet) a simple Markdown content management system (CMS) for Node-RED.
Only started yesterday and I've already got the basics working. It uses Node-RED's existing marked renderer.
The idea being to ultimately create something similar to Docsify but using existing Node-RED and UIBUILDER capabilities.
I suspect a lot of people may find this helpful.
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