I recently had a paper published written in org mode and I have another in review. I don't plan to write straight LaTeX again.

For me, babel is the killer feature. I can write code snippets in the buffer, highlighted and indented according to the corresponding emacs mode, with paredit for lisp, and beautifully exported via pygments. A single key combo lets me evaluate my code in persistent repls associated with my buffer, and I can choose what combo of code/result I want to export. I had some of my snippets generate raw LaTeX that I could include in the document.

Org links make section references trivial, and I have it hooked up to ebib so my citations are pure org. In the emacs buffer, clicking a citation link takes me straight to the bibtex entry.

I don't much use the organiser, but I do use org heavily for writing cross referenced notes about other people's code.