I did - it's slicker with better UX for sure, but technically what's different?

OK. I have. I do still think this. The interface differences — which I acknowledge, and are significant, and maybe that's worth the switch — haven't landed that way for me yet. But I just do not see any differences in functionality, and I'd have to give up _a lot_ to get the interface.

The live-edit interface is double-edged. It's a split-second more convenient to edit but easier to make mistakes and harder to revert anything more than a typo. Every time I miss a TODO I end up editing the TODO instead and breaking it.

There's nothing in here that's appreciably better than MW's raw editor. I can't enable multi-cursor editing in Roam, and I doubt it would ever be an option across nodes/list items.

If I run the window vertically (or especially push to 1/3 screen width) I lose all value from the right sidebar.

There seems to be a lot of functionality tucked into right-click menus that are inconsistent, _extremely_ context-sensitive, and in some cases require considerable dexterity that I don't have. (Right click the _bullet_ for formatting?) Why aren't they keyboard shortcuts for these functions?

Block editing and versioning are neat, but less powerful than MW templates — again, a feature for me, probably not for the target audience? It's easy to create new versions in blocks — too easy, because how do I remove one I've added by accident? Are whole pages versioned?

The inline reverse mentions/backlinks are nice, though I don't know what they're good for yet. I already easily take advantage of backlinks in MW without needing them cluttering the inline content, and I can already sketch out how to add them in MW using its API if I can better grok the value of surfacing them. Otherwise they're already — at most — a click and keyboard shortcut away.

Surfacing full-text search results in the live search bar drags the interface down immensely, and isn't what I want out of that bar _at all_. That's the only thing I can see that's net negative. Browser lag on the third letter of a four-letter word was measurable in seconds — just chill out and let me enter the word.

The on-page context filters are neat. That's a feature that would legit take some work to implement in MW.

Bottom line, if the hook is "embeddable backlinked content in a lightweight editor", I get that in a non-VisualEditor MediaWiki install, plus a superior text editor and an API. And the API — again, to me, acknowledging that if I don't see the value Roam adds to that model, then I guess I'm not the audience — is still by itself a total dealbreaker even before I get to not being _able_ to self-host, not seeing the backup/restore story, not having any offline editing options, and not having a useful mobile editing story.