I don’t think I can comment on this front. Maybe if I got a concussion, lost my coding abilities, and then tried…? hah.
I think it’s just that if you have the ability to script a little, Obsidian pays dividends. Similar to how using e.g., Bookends and Zotero might be basically equivalent unless you are good at AppleScript, in which case you can do more with Bookends, but it doesn’t affect your use of Zotero, because the latter can’t do AppleScript.
Certainly, though, some of the benefits I’m talking about (e.g., neat Dataview queries that give me views into my tasks and projects) would require you to just copy-paste what I (will eventually) share to use. That’s one kicker—to make the most of it, you’ll have to depend on community members who are sharing their approaches. It would be better if there was a good GUI for these features instead, making them more accessible to non-coders. Maybe eventually!
At this point I write markdown in Messages, even though it doesn’t render, so I’m definitely guilty of the overuse Gruber was talking about.
However, I think Gruber’s wrong about that—making him just a recent example of a classic pattern: the inventor who spurns uses of his inventions he didn’t imagine! (I’ve actually argued with him and Dave Weiner about this…)
Markdown’s really just a grammar for adding stuff to words. And it’s a really convenient one, because by representing that stuff in plain text, it’s easier to manipulate and use it. For me, it’s an escape from the fight with proprietary formats of a decade ago. You should be able to put something in plain text that, without being exported or imported, can be rendered in any number of applications. That’s the key, for me: one copy of anything.
However, the latter part of your question here definitely makes things challenging. I do have to write in Word for academia, and so inevitably the stuff I make has to be converted from Markdown to .docx. There’s lots of good options for this, so it doesn’t bother me too much, but yes—there is a very annoying step in the paper-writing process where I take the results of such an export and spend half-an-hour modifying it to fit whatever template is required.
However x 2, I’ve never been able to escape from that last step. In my experience, publishing in academia always demands some kind of convert-to-the-conference-template step, and that’s always annoying. So, whether I have to do that from a rich text editor or a markdown editor, it’s still there.
I used to use them simultaneously → Using Obsidian and NotePlan together.
Obsidian’s since built out a few features that let me drop the sync process. But yes, if you can/want to make it work, it’s a fun combo. I believe @JohnAtl and others here are more of an expert on NotePlan these days than I am now! → Some of my NotePlan templates and use cases