The beginning workflow was VS Code, and I certainly appreciate your note about the partially implemented featureset of most orgmode non-Emacs clients.
I then discovered Orgzly (http://www.orgzly.com/) which I hooked up to VS Code using Drop Box free. Orgzly is fantastic and supports a lot more of orgmode than most clients. (edited to add: orgzly is an android app)
Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs running on either Windows 10 or OS X terminals. There's a decent cheat sheet (https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf) that I refer to a lot.
So my advice would be to give orgmode a try using Orgzly at first, then get a simple instance of Emacs going and use the cheat sheet to make things easier to learn and dip into. I think the push to try to do things outside of Emacs is throwing away the orgmode original codebase baby with the Emacs bathwater. I know Emacs is considered scarier even than vim, but for my simple use case it works well. It was even fairly easy to get the org-jira plugin working to pull my Jira tickets into TODO items.