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Nothing beats org-mode.

Yeah, Org mode has supported footnotes since 2008:

https://github.com/bzg/org-mode/commit/40a149354c4e5992abac4...

If only I could have it in any other way than emacs...

Makes me wonder, since there is evil mode and opinionated Emacs disributions like Spacemacs und Doom Emacs, whether there is a potential for an org-mode focussed and optimized Emacs distribution.

Ease of use should be one of the core goals, then.

I would love that but then again org-noter and pdftools compliment base org-mode nicely.

Yeah, the lack of nested formatting in rST is crazy. For me it's annoying I can't just do a simple monospace formatted link in pure rST. Sphinx helps a bit with that depending on what you want to link, but it's not really controllable at the rST level like it is in other markup.

Yes... I do like asciidoc. Think it was lack of easy toolchain in python ecosystem that made me move away from it.

Maybe asciidoc3 har improved the situation.

Never needed bold italics. :)