I get that Org-mode is extremely powerful, but I was talking about Org-social specifically. Take a look at the spec, does it use much programmability? To me it looks like just annotating a bunch of metadata plus a unique ID (which is actually just a timestamp, which seems problematic to me for a number of reasons, eg tracking edits, not being necessarily unique,...).
I don't understand what you're saying. If everyone on the team uses Excel to manipulate data and they share it around in .xlsx files, you wouldn't tell them "why not .csv?", right?
I'd say it's more like they're sending around csv tables in the body of emails and then writing VBA scripts to copy them into Excel. In that case, yeah, I might mention that there are better ways to do it.
Org-mode is far more than just a markup. It is executable - you can have executable code-blocks (in different languages) that interact with one another. It is interactive - there are TODO items, agendas, and scheduling that integrate with your workflow. It has built-in calendar, deadlines, and habit tracking. It has spreadsheets with calculations, like in Excel. It is insanely programmable.
Sure, it is also a markup, but the markup is just the interface to a much richer computational document model.
So, what you're finding to be weird is only because you are unfamiliar with it. It is in fact highly pragmatic, and there's nothing weird about it; you just have not experienced that firsthand, and that's alright.