Every so often I get into using org mode for a while, and the first day or so is always great. But, as with every similar tool in the space, I quickly find cases where the different features don't compose or interact well.

For example,

- org mode will fill out/align an ascii table if you start it and tab. When you change a cell, just tab, and everything aligns into a well-formed table again. Great!

- org mode will let you type latex and then `C-c C-x C-l` to render those latex snippets in text. Lovely!

- but the table logic is unaware of whether $latex-snippets$ have been rendered or not, so you can't see an aligned table whose cells contain latex snippets

Yes, one could do the whole table in latex, but this is more verbose and more fragile if one is incrementally building out the table as one takes notes, and occasionally previewing to confirm it's not broken.

Roughly, I think this illustrates a key tension where

- if everything is pure text, then improving tools is 'easy'

- but people don't actually want pure text for all uses; for some domains, dealing only with text requires some mental energy which can detract from the actual task of interest