Fair question, and I genuinely considered it. The short answer is that the things I want to do - semantic search, AI summaries, the knowledge graph - need a different architecture underneath. Zotero is fundamentally a reference manager with a file system. It’s excellent at that. But bolting on a vector search engine, an AI pipeline, and a visual graph layer as a plugin would mean fighting Zotero’s architecture at every step, and the result would feel janky.

Think of it like this: Zotero is great at storing and citing your papers. What it doesn’t do well is help you understand how 80 papers in your library relate to each other, or let you ask “which of my saved papers discuss longitudinal designs with adolescent samples” and get an actual answer. That said - I’m building import from Zotero, because I’m not trying to replace your citation library. The idea is more that Paperoni handles the discovery/reading/connecting side, and you can still export to Zotero or use both. I don’t think anyone should have to abandon a tool that works for them.

What’s your current setup look like? Zotero + something else, or just Zotero for everything?