Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.

Meh. Most of the metadata is actually not that hard to understand in source form.

Though, I think this is a valid concern (and I hate that). It is just similar to how people used to have markup in their documents to see what they were typing, but people are lured by anything that hides this markup. See, nobody actually likes typing \bold{hello} instead of just highlighting and bolding. More, people just want the markup to be hidden.

Orgmode shines not because it hides anything. But because it made a very coherent set of macros to type the markup that I want to use. That and source blocks. (Ok, mainly source blocks.)

> the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.

This is basically why I switched to Asciidoc. And if you need to collaborate with others you can point to different editors that people can use, there is even AsciidocFX which is made specifically for new users.

Not using those other editors is an added benefit.

Not unless you work alone. When you work with other people, it's important to use a common format for the benefit of the group. Trying to force other people to use emacs won't win you any friends.

Org exports to anything including utf8 plain text with a nice style reminiscent of IEEE RFCs.

Without using Emacs Org-mode however, you're stuck with something that only you can properly enjoy and edit, so everyone who doesn't like Emacs is SOL.

Using emacs is a giant drawback however.

If you are more of a vim person and don't like emacs modifier keys, I suggest checking out spacemacs.

Oh no, I'd rather use a modern editor. Both are cults that need to die.

There is an open source Javascript package for OrgMode file parsing and converting here[0]

Example demo javascript webapp[1]

Orgmode Vim[2]

OrgMode IntelliJ [3]

OrgMode Atom [4]

OrgMode Sublime [5]

OrgMode VSCode [6]

[0] https://github.com/mooz/org-js

[1] http://mooz.github.io/org-js/

[2] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

[3] https://github.com/skuro/org4idea

[4] https://atom.io/packages/organized

[5] https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode

[6] https://github.com/jsonreeder/vscode-org-mode

Unfortunately org-mode is not backwards-compatible and there have been many changes which break things unnecessarily.

For example, I once attempted to run this org-mode "notebook", ironically titled "Reproducible Research with Emacs Org-mode", and found I had to make significant cosmetic changes to get it to build: https://github.com/eliask/orgmode-iKNOW2012

Maybe things have improved since, but backwards compatibility is important for these kinds of formats.