About 1000 times per day, someone says emacs is too big an ask for org-mode, and someone replies, it's configurable to feel like whatever you're used to.

The latter needs to accept that most users, particularly scientists, reject out-of-hand anything requiring configuration or compilation no matter how trivial.

But it's all moot since org-mode is largely promoted by non-scientists (computer science is not a science), and should a wysiwig-inclined scientist ever get past the emacs obstacle, he'll balk at the awkward BEGIN_SRC incantations.