Comment by kqr

> A weird poorly specified format that is only fully editable from one editor.

While this has been true historically, the Org maintainers are moving away from that approach.

The example that comes to mind is that parsing and interpretation of formatting markup such as *bold* and /italics/ used to be controllable by Emacs Lisp variables that dictate things like which neighbouring characters cancel the interpretation of the markup as markup, or the maximum allowed distance between delimiters for them to count as a pair. Such things have been moved into standardised parsing routines now, with no variables for customising it.