As a long-time Emacs user, I am of course aware of Org mode and have used it extensively. However, I have been looking for alternatives and recently switched from Org mode to Obsidian for the bulk of my notes.

Why would someone who is enlightened give up the editing power of Emacs for an Electron app? Am I going through the same phase as Neal Stephenson and become an Eloi? Actually, I still use Emacs to edit my notes.

Obsidian is a propriety offline Electron application for taking notes, with support for backlinks and graph view. It is priced reasonably at $0 for most users, and it saves all of its data (that is, all of your data) as Markdown files. The last point is crucial, because Markdown is a widely used standard, thus enabling me to edit the files in Emacs.

So it is better to say that I switched from Org mode not to Obsidian, but to Markdown. I still use Org mode for its power and extensibility in specific cases, but it is that power which makes Org mode undesirable for the general case because that power is only available from Emacs. Outside of Emacs, without that power, Org mode is simply a markup language that is incompatible with and unsupported by all other software. You could use Pandoc to export it as a better supported format, but why not use that other format to begin with?

Some of you may be itching to point out that Markdown is not standardized, and you'd be technically correct. But it is also technically correct that despite the lack of a standard, you could pick a Markdown file and it would be far better supported across far more applications and libraries than an Org file. The core bits of Markdown are a de facto standard, and Markdown is so widely used that you could easily translate between flavors with various tools. That's the power of market share.