I was always a bit frustrated by the way nbconvert pulled in pandoc as a dependency, but then didn't make use of any of its power (pandoc surely has a powerful AST). Instead they re-implemented filters and templates themselves. It struck me that it would have been much cleaner to write a proper 'ipynb > AST' Pandoc reader, and then expose pandoc AST filters and templates.

I was a bit suspicious of moving away from pandoc to sphinx, because sphinx seems markedly less powerful and general than pandoc. However, you seem to think it's the opposite! Does Sphinx have an AST? I can't see any reference?

By contrast sphinx uses docutils AST: https://github.com/live-clones/docutils/blob/master/docutils..., the documentation is not great (working on that) but it is pretty powerful.

My main concern with jupyter is that I prefer orgmode (and by a lot), but I know that it's niche and most people don't even heard about it ipnbs are preferred form of notebook exchange.

I will check how good translation to/from orgmode is then.

The only remaining tooling gap is a markdown linter implemented in python.