You can certainly write org in ed, if you're masochistic enough. You could also use Vim or VSCode or whatever floats your boat, and you will just be missing the

You can certainly write org in ed, if you're masochistic enough. You could also use Vim or VSCode or whatever floats your boat, and you will just be missing the more useful stuff (agenda integration, babel, etc), but if you just want to use it as a markup language, there's good support in other editors, and ease of export as well (pdf, html, docx, odt...) with pandoc. I don't get why you think that editing org is any harder than editing markdown, given editor support.