Ok. I was an Evernote user for years, and was happy to pay their fees for what the program did. I'm a university professor (music) and I used it to keep my class notes and readings in. However, over the years it became slower and slower as it (presumably) became bloatware. Thus I embarked on a search to find a replacement.
The first port of call was Nimbus. I don't recommend anyone goes near this. It ended up being super-expensive and, worse, it really does lock your data up. I've found a workaround to import data, but it's slow and I have a few files there.
The next port of call was Bear. Some may have read my complaint on the reddit group. Bear is a beautiful program, but it's taken so long to add basic functionality (like, you know tables). That was sort of a dealbreaker.
I then tried Scrivener. This is great for long-form writing, but not great for a note taking app. However, I love its iOS app, which is beautiful.
I looked at Obsidian briefly, but it didn't vibe. I get the idea of backlinks, but that's not what I use it for. And something about it seemed a little off.
Finally, I checked out Joplin. I'd checked it out in a half-assed fashion years ago. No idea why I didn't take it up. I'm used to Markdown, and have written academic papers in it before. More than any other program, it ticked most of the boxes. It integrates with my workflow well. I can write abc music notation in it. I can export to web easily. It does plugins. It has tables. 
It also has a forward momentum.
If I was to say what would make it perfect, these would be on the list:
- Find and replace. This is fairly basic functionality. Hell, Wordperfect had it.
- The iOS app. I do a lot of writing on the desktop app, which is as good (or better) than Scrivener or Bear, both beautiful programs. But the Joplin iOS app isn't a great writing experience. Yet. I do a lot of my mobile writing on the iPad (I'm a minimalist writer), and usually I write in Bear and transfer to Joplin. I understand that the Google Summer of Coding is looking at this, and I hope the iOS experience improves.
- I do miss the heirarchical tags that Evernote had, but it's not the end of the world.
So thank you, Laurent. Thank you contributors. While my coding isn't at this level (yet), I contribute financially to the project. I'll hopefully be with Joplin longer than the decade I was with Evernote.
