I love Obsidian. Use it everyday. Always finding new projects for using it. It seems that development has slowed to a few tweaking things every few weeks. (The updates on the community plugins also seem noticeably thin, now.)
I suppose Obsidian is at the top of the s-curve and has gone about as far as it can go, feature wise. I don’t know what more could be invented. Always nice to have a firecracker app come along and watch it mature. This one was special.
Katie
The public roadmap isn’t as packed as it used to be, but there are still a ton of feature requests open on the forum.
Because a lot of Obsidian’s capabilities are driven by plugins, I’d like to see the core app make it easier to find and discover them, starting with categories and user star ratings. There are almost 2,000 now and it’s not as easy to keep track of what’s available now, especially since the demise of Eleanor Konik’s excellent weekly Obsidian Roadmap.
Obsidian has matured quickly. There is some tidying up to do - mobile startup and quick capture being a key ’ feature’ along with integrated PDF annotation come to mind - but with plugins it’s functioning well.
It’s hard to know which plugin features they could bring into core, and whether that’s necessary. One challenge is a number of plugin authors have moved on to other things and their plugins have either become buggy, broken or are at risk if there are breaking changes in Obsidian core. A slow pace of change may mitigate that to some extent, but as an application that may be a medium term threat once the enthusiastic “hackers” have moved to a new toy. Some of the bigger themes and plugins are already abandoned.
It’s a real shame no one from the community was able to take over the Obsidian Roundup from Eleanor. This has been a truly helpful resource.
I’ve only recently begun using Obsidian and truly love it. For my use cases (mainly note taking with linking, good search and using templates) I am happy with the current state. It’s just so much nicer than reading Markdown in a plain-text editor, but also, fantastic to have the option to do just that. Everybody will have different needs, but there’s something to be said for “just right” amount of complexity.
Agree that plug-ins are a great way to allow extensibility of the core product.
Dynamic Tables seems like it could be a dynamite feature. Like Projects or DB Folders but built into the app.
I’m cautious about relying on plug-ins for my work. What if the plug-ins are no longer maintained?
Also, Obsidian on the iPhone is barely usable, and the iPad is not great either. If anything tempts me off Obsidian, it’s that.
They should start with a web clipper as good as Evernote. 
. That’s a big task.
Yes it is. And it is a never ending rabbit hole of adding your own customisation metadata and writing your own DB queries. OH, and then noticing that your tables need some tweaking with respect to the theme your are using, so you add your own custom CSS while you are at it.
Obsidian is the Emacs of note taking!
Me. You’re describing me there.
My numerous attempts to make PKM/zettelkasten work for me in Obsidian have all failed, and I’m increasingly accepting that I’m a folders guy.
I recently installed an Automator script that lets me open any page in my Obsidian vault from the Finder. I’m basically using Obsidian as a Markdown editor with wiki-style links and I’m happy with it.
I thought Org-mode was the Emacs of note taking 
I absolutely love Obsidian. But I do wonder if Phillips maybe it’s not become a big cash cow for folks, I’m not sure if that was ever anticipated or not. But… A rapper in the 90s said if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense. I don’t buy that mentality, I get that it drives many businesses.
I checked a few bucks to developers for particular plug-ins, or themes. As someone who does not do code or program, I get that it’s not easy and that it could be very time-consuming.
I wonder if what we’re saying is a chef from one shiny new object to another, and a loss of interest because it is not a money making opportunity for many. I can be a bit cynical at times though.
I think for many plugin developers there was been some tail off in interest. The plugin directory is full of plugins that haven’t been updated in a couple of years, some with a long list of issues. The early adopters are often the ones who like to be at the start of something new, and have moved on… especially since few users willing to pay for plugins.
For the Obsidian team themselves I suspect associated services like Sync and Publish will provide reasonable revenue, especially now Sync has a relatively inexpensive pricing tier. Even then, Reddit and the forums are full of people trying to avoid paying any subs… and want Obsidian to be free.
I’m happy to pay a little to keep my most used tool going.
I agree. Obsidian Sync is hassle free and works seamlessly.