We have had very similar experiences with Evernote, then. I also used Google Notebook before the (in my opinion very efficient) product was discontinued. Google Docs on the other hand forces you to open entire documents. This doesn't work well when the most frequent use case is a quick-and-dirty append.

This may sound like a "solve everything with git" type comment, but honestly, I have found that keeping a set of markdown files in a git repository (frequently pushed to github) works well for me. I can have a quick script that appends a default journal file for thoughts I don't want to spend time organizing immediately. For everything else, I open up the relevant .md file and add a bullet point.

So far it's working better than anything I've experimented with over the last ten years.