I think when it comes to organising work / papers / notes, etc., over time you converge to more and more minimal tools, that do some particular thing really well and really fast, rather than continuing to use a more locked-in GUI version that hides limitations behind ease-of-use. Evernote is great - you just might find that you'll outgrow it at some point and look for something with a bit more fine-grained control.

I'm speaking from the point of view of having looked at using all the different flashy to-do lists, all the different 'revolutionary' note taking tools (including Evernote quite extensively), and now using Obsidian, which is basically an IDE for markdown with ability to link files to one another.

The simpler tools force you to come up with systems of organisation / linking if you want to do something more complex, but that's the great thing - you get to build your own system incrementally to a point where it's something that actually works really well for you. It's also Electron, so you can write your own plugins!

Not the parent, but given they are moving to Obsidian I'd say it's motivated by a desire to self-host and rely less on cloud services.

It’s a desire to get off cloud based tools where storage of highly personal data is encouraged but without no-knowledge encryption in place, which is increasingly frustrating to me.

Especially for a company like Evernote who are no strangers to security issues.

I also dislike the “AI based” content suggestion crap or whatever that is. I don’t want that in my note taking tool. Things like that cross a line for me. It feels yucky.

And in general Evernote has totally stagnated as a product in my opinion.

I’d even happily pay them more money if the product fitted more in alignment with my use-case.

It’s really been great over the years but there is so much they could have done to keep it relevant and for me it just isn’t any more.

DropBox has gone a little in the same direction. An “originally great” disruptive product that sadly has bloated and stagnated without adding much more actual value on top of the original concept.

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For me it's just painfully slow.