I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. It's probably just me, because most other organizers don't work for me, but if you're going to do a file-based organizer, it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place.
I used emacs for nearly two decades, and I agree.
I tried - so hard - to get into org-mode, but just couldn't do it. I'd use it religiously for a week or two, and then the inertia was just too high. Or maybe I really didn't need all the features. Who knows.
Saying you "don't get" org-mode is blasphemy in the church of emacs, so I just assumed something was wrong with me and kept my mouth shut, and used it as a very simple todo list.
I would, however, use org-mode if I were say, working on a PhD or doing long-term public research where keeping everything in an open format was essential.
http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...
The tables functionality is also great, and the structural editing aspects (move subtrees, bullet lists, etc) is very handy when editing as well.
Genuinely curious: What did you find problematic with Org mode? I could not understand your example.
It would be bad advertising to say Org Mode is for everyone. Most people I know use OneNote, and frankly, One Note really is better in many ways. I would not try to convince them to switch to org mode. And although Org Mode is very powerful, there isn't a reason a given person should need all that power.
For me, when I encountered it while living in Linux land, I simply did not have any alternatives. I don't remember the name, but I was using a tool provided by KDE, and Org Mode was far better by comparison. So even for simple notes, Org mode was the superior choice. All the extra bells and whistles were icing on the cake. My email was all text as well (mutt). And it was really nice to switch to Emacs for email (notmuch) and have Org mode create TODOs with links to emails.
Hmm. What do you mean exactly? I have all sorts of stuff in my org mode files, and what keeps track of them for me is the agenda view (i.e. it finds TODOs, deadlines, events, etc).
For me it's the seamless transition (no transition?) between deciding to do something, creating an outline, creating todo's, scheduling them/creating deadlines, writing code directly under the todo's using org-babel.