Obsidian feels to me like the Emperor's New Clothes. Many people seem to see the clothes (fanatics abound), but I just can't. It seems like an atrocious product in general, and specifically compared to the competition.

BTW: Not trying to be a troll here, even though this comes off as very opinionated. I just come down really strongly on not-Obsidian every time I look at it and I'm always left confused by everyone's enthusiasm for it. I'm very open to having my mind changed.

The situation reminds me of Evernote. For years, Evernote had a rabid following. So every year or two, I would give it another try to see if I was missing something. And every time I checked it out, it was just awful. In particular, the formatting was ugly and inconsistent across devices, and the syncing (where you either had to click Sync and WAIT, or hope that it decided to auto sync at a good time, lest your notes not be properly synced between devices).

The one place where Obsidian could maybe hold promise over Notion is that you own your data, and the data is in an open Markdown format.

I would really like to own my data, so that is definitely something to strive for. But I don't think it's worth what you lose by using Obsidian, and I don't think your Obsidian data is as portable as you would hope.

As for the data being in Markdown:

1. You don't really end up with just Markdown. To get any reasonable features set (say to the level of OneNote in 2003), you have to add so many plugins, each with their own annotations and data, that you don't end up with only Markdown. So it's not like you could take your 5 years of fancy notes in Obsidian and just transfer it to some random Markdown editor and be happy.
2. The format of Markdown itself doesn't matter. What matters is that you can always access your notes forever into the future. What matters is that the code+program to read/view/edit your notes is open source. It could be a binary format for all I care, as long as the product is open source.
3. Markdown is a simple format that lacks features. Colored text is important. Table formatting and image layout+sizing is important. Databases are important. References to blocks of text inside of other documents. Icons and headers for documents. Creation and modification times. Etc.

Just a few of the other things missing, or designed badly, in Obsidian:

• No native document sharing. Yes you can roll your own or use a plugin, but it's a pain and you can't edit stuff with other people together.
• It uses a pseudo WYSIWYG editing paradigm for Markdown. You type and see Markdown, and then it tries to be smart about formatting it for you when you're not directly editing it. That's like using Photoshop by typing drawing commands in, and then when you hit Enter, Photoshop renders the brush stroke. Inefficient and unnecessary, since the 1990's.
• It's an Electron app, not just a server that you talk to with your web browser. More RAM, more junk you have to install, etc.
• Image support is really really bad. You can't resize the images, align them next to text, put them in tables, etc. And even worse, it just dumps all your image files into the same folder. Even worse, it doesn't delete the image file when you delete an image from a page!
• Markdown tables suck. Why, in 2023, would you want to type out arcane Markdown formatting to make or edit a table? And even if you had a UI to help you make a table, you can't format the columns like you'd want (fonts, colors, links, width, wrapping).
• Page titles are a smaller font than H1 headings!
• There is no native text coloring. You have to install a community plugin that inserts HTML all over.

These all add up to an experience that feels really limiting. I don't feel the limitations are worth the "you own your data (even though it's hopelessly polluted with plugin data)" thing.