I have wrestled with it too. I believe it's because wikitext is an ad-hoc format that evolved so that the only 100% correct parser/renderer is the MediaWiki implementation. It's like asking for an SDK that correctly parses Perl. Only Perl can do that.

There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.