Comment by iLemming

This isn't a "religious war", because similarities of Markdown and Org-mode are only superficial, once you learn more about the differences, you will see what actually makes Org-mode much, much different.

- Org's outline is semantic - the nesting IS the data structure. You can collapse/expand, refile, navigate as a tree natively. Markdown treats `#` markers as decoration on top of flat text.

- Org drawers, properties, timestamps are integrated. Markdown frontmatter is bolted on.

- Org has in-buffer table editing. Markdown tables are write-once text blobs.

- Org can execute code blocks and weave results back into the document. Markdown extensions can display code, but they don't integrate execution.

- Org can track what links to what, rename headings and update links automatically.

Your claim of the "20% stylistic" is just wrong - those feature differences aren't cosmetic - they do change how you use the tool for knowledge work.

> If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants

Org-mode does have fragmentation - it's just vertical (depth of features) rather than horizontal (incompatible variants) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, et al.

Org-mode is less "one format" and more "a Lisp-cursed toolkit where everyone assembles their own variant through configuration" The Markdown variants are at least standardized incompatibility - you kinda know what GFM does. With Org, you don't really know what someone's personal setup supports until you try it.

If Org-mode had GitHub's reach and people were pushing personal variants of the spec onto the web, you'd absolutely see 20+ "Org-flavored Markdown" projects. The consistency is partly an accident of Org being the domain of power users who configure rather than fork.

There's no "causative reason" for why markdown is more popular than Org - the entire argument is just nonsense. Nobody in the right mind (with the proper Org-mode experience) would ever argue "which is better". It's like arguing LaTeX vs. Word - LaTeX is clearly technically superior for certain tasks, even though Word won institutional dominance - but only those who have very little exposure to LaTeX would argue that "Word's popularity proves it's better designed...", or something.