Ironically I think org-mode is a great example of a non-malleable system. When I started using it I slowly tried to customize it to better suit my needs, but everything was quite brittle.
I'd say it's very customizable, but requires (sometimes significant) time investements.
I'll respond here since can't reply to the original comment:
1. "leading stars" -- I think the solution is org-hide-leading-stars (and it is basically the hack you are describing)
2. "now it takes multiple seconds to refresh my agenda view" -- org-super-agenda is a pretty mature library handles groups well. As for performance, the most significant speedup for me was setting org-agenda-span to a lower value
3. "it's actually pretty hard to find good examples of a full org-mode workflow." -- agree. One reason is perhaps because it's quite hard to communicate your workflow to other people becaue it's too specific to your needs.
4. "But problematically I now have a lot of files with similar names" -- yep, refile-outline-path, but also uniquify helps a lot.
5. "Apparently org-mode deliberately prevents the end user from adding their own custom emphasis formats" -- don't know whether that's the case; but you can abuse org-add-link-type, then you could write [highlight:Some text to highligtht], and do whatever styling you want during the export. Hacky, but kinda does the job.
Finally, it's at least possible in theory to override any org-mode function and change the logic. Of course, you can do it with any other text editor, but it would be way less effort to hack Emacs (even if it's dirty and adhoc).
I can however understand the frustration. It took me several attempts to pick up Emacs and Org-mode specifically. And I'm still very often frustrated by it, but I personally find being able to bend your editor into doing exactly what you want worth the effort.
> And I'm still very often frustrated by it, but I personally find being able to bend your editor into doing exactly what you want worth the effort.
I agree with this assessment. Emacs is frustrating and terrible and you'll never get things just right, but as a software developer, I've found its extensibility and programmability to be profoundly life-altering.
> I'd say it's very customizable, but requires (sometimes significant) time investements.
It seemed like with enough effort I could get emacs to mostly do what I wanted, but it never seemed like I could get it to do what I wanted well. Maybe I just gave up on it too soon.
Yes, it's quite brittle. Looking over your list, part of the problem is also that it was written to function as a WYSIWIG system in an environment meant for text buffers (rather than a generic MVC like framework where you could apply an arbitrary transformation on the on-disk data to present on the screen).
If you're a power user who would like a very malleable system, I can't imagine anything better than Scribble/Pollen. IME it felt very natural to use, and is infinitely flexible (fully-programmable in Racket).
1. org-bullets
2. it seems like a bug with performance for long lines in emacs
(at least it was in my case)
3. there is no size fits all: my org file are header, code blocks -heavy
lots of hierarchy, tags, properties; yours may be completely different
4. refilling works via narrowing the list of candidates using ivy
(it the same interface used for switching to a project, opening a file, switching to a different buffer, running a command, etc)
This is a good example of my frustration. The solution you suggested allows you to change how an existing emphasis character appears in emacs, but does not allow you to add a new emphasis character. Not great if you still want to be able to use all the old emphasis characters.
To add highlighting without interfering with an existing emphasis character, you're stuck with some ugly hacks (of which I tried a few before giving up). Apparently the reason for this particular limitation is so that org-mode has a consistent syntax for parsing outside of emacs (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-02/msg...). I don't care about parsing outside of emacs (and even if I did, it doesn't seem too terrible to just have my custom emphasis character get printed to the screen without the appropriate formatting). A truly malleable system wouldn't make it so hard for me to modify it to my liking based on my particular needs.
I was able to consistently get emacs/org-mode to work sorta how I wanted it to, but it was _always_ hacky and clunky.
Posted a comment awhile back with some specific examples from my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551598