Tough crowd here. Hard to guess what kind of post will pass muster from the regulars.
Katie
I am always hyper-focused on pro/con/features etc. I just went through this below trying to identify the most suitable app for my notes when I am teaching for quick access and wiki-navigation - still don’t know which I will use.
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The perfect is the enemy of the good.
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I’ve struggled with Dynalist. I used it for a while for simple lists. But it’s a very un-Mac app and that was a bit of a turnoff to me.
I’m thinking more about outliners as a research organizing tool though. I loved the recent Omni podcast with John Gruber, talking about how he uses OmniOutliner.
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OmniOutliner is great. But I figured that I would have to use it with Omni Focus to get the most out of it. That is a lot of money 
I never felt like Dynalist was an un-Mac app. It has a clean design and works swiftly. I also like that I can adjust Dynalist to my workflow. It can be a simple outliner or a capable GTD tool or even a project manager.
I listened to that episode but came away a little disappointed. He’s friends with the devs and has used the app for a long time, but uses it lightly (if often) and much less than power users - especially anyone today paying the somewhat absurd prices for it ($50 for the iOS Pro app, $100 for the Mac Pro unlock). Kirk McElhearn complained about the pricing on his blog and I’d have to agree with him, especially since the app is essentially in maintenance mode these days. As noted on that podcast OmniFocus is actually based on an old OmniOutliner Kinkless GTD script, but it’s currently where the vast majority of programming talent, and support, and discussions are focused.
I use the app, but not happily. The theming is a godawful mess, there’s no simple way to share themes (something trivial in Ulysses or Highland), and more questions in the dev’s OO forum seem to get unanswered these days.
Unfortunately, the outliner competition is mostly moribund on the Mac, either simplistic in comparison (eg Cloud Outliner) or scarcely updated (eg Outlinely), or has moved on to being a cross-platform web service with unknown security and so-so iOS options. And that’s because outliners in general are a niche that never quite broke out to the public, but there are lots of outliner-y offshoots that are much more successful, in the task management and mindmapping areas.
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As far as I could tell, Gruber uses OO without OF. He seems to keep track fo to-dos by jotting them in a notebook and, if they require writing out more than one or two steps, that’s where OO comes in.
That surprised me. I figured with a guy like Gruber, he’d probably be using OF and scripting and customizing it out the wazoo.
I don’t disagree with your points about the power-user-ness of Gruber on OO. But it was a fun episode nonetheless.
I like listening to Gruber. He’s smart, he thinks deeply about Apple-related things, and he tries to speak as precisely and clearly as he can. Most of the backstory he related was old news to me, but it wasn’t unpleasant to hear the raconteur speak.
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I’ve been intrigued by outlining apps, but I always return to simple Markdown lists. Curious - what benefit do they provide people?
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You might want to listen to the latest episode of The Omni Show with John Gruber about how he uses OmniOutliner:
Personally I use outlines for a few things, outlines for ScreenCasts ONLINE, books I’m writing (I start in MindNode, then move to OmniOutliner to make it linear and flesh it out, before I get started with writing). One key feature of OmniOutliner that I use, which I can’t really get with a Markdown list, is columns. This way I can add an extra column such as a checkbox for “recorded”, or a text area for “recorded”.
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Expanding and collapsing heading and subheading nodes, hoisting groups, comments, and more (in some outliners columns). Been using them since the 80s.
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This article (I think someone posted it on MPU before) is only partly about outliners, but it is a good user case, even though the author ended up using the Zettelkasten method
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Nice thing about Notion is that web clipper action, which would let you send direct to a specific “page” in your Notion set up. But if this is a serious project, you need Devonthink Pro. No beating it for research and clipping and organizing tons of web (and any other) data. Pricey, and no joke to learn. But its the mother bear.
Curio is cool, but the SHARING is weak. Not flexible enough.
My own experience is that Curio sharing is very good - what it’s not good with is collaboration. I can share content easily in a variety of formats - pdf, html, markdown, opml, text - but it’s manual and one way.
And there’s no mobile access
I tried using Duet Air to connect to Mac with iPad remotely (not as a second screen) and using Curio. It worked Never tried it for serious work, though.
Sidecar works with Curio too (obviously not remotely, though)
I use Sidecar when I want to make written notes or annotate a PDF. But the lack of an iOS app is something that held me back from Curio. But once I tried it, the app was just to good Sidecar is nice and when I REALLY need to work on the way in Curio, I can try Duet Air, but these are just work arounds. Even an iOS Curio reader with some basic note taking ability would be awesome.