Its true that org mode is useful for organising various stuff, but it can also do other things, literate programming. it also lets you work with multiple programming languages at the same time. I think that is more powerful than even the jupyter notebooks. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html

Yes, super jealous of org mode. For my literate programming I try to follow the Vim philosophy of delegating to external tools: http://akkartik.name/post/wart-layers. My approach adds some new capabilities, but it's not nearly as nice an experience.

I tried vimoutliner (and some other org-mode clones in vim) shortly after I switched to emacs and learned to use org-mode, and found that these clones weren't anywhere near as powerful as org. As far as I know, there really is no substitute.

I'm somewhat drawn to helpers like this, but what ends up being a pollutant for me is the system within a system paradigm. With emacs I have the same problem. I enjoy the UNIX philosophy where one program should do one thing and interesting things come from composing them. I'd love for similar helpers, as I've called them, to be implemented as cli tools. You would then call them from vim for example. Interactivity would be sacrificed, but I don't value it lot. This probably makes me a purist or some other -ist.

If it comforts you, think of Emacs as a VM, which happens to automatically boot into a text editor.