So in the interest of finishing things, I think I've got the basics of the structuredtext list parser working. It's a bit finicky but it does properly parser well-formed input:
And here's the HTML it generated:
<p>parser</p><ul><li><p>list</p><blockquote><p>blockquote</p></blockquote><p>mor e list</p><ul><li><p>sublist</p></li></ul> </li><li><p>list 2</p></li></ul><p>meow</p>
I was pretty happy the first time that worked... :D