I have been using jupytext as well and it really makes handling notebooks much easier. I think the decision for Jupyter to save to json was not a good one and t

I have been using jupytext as well and it really makes handling notebooks much easier. I think the decision for Jupyter to save to json was not a good one and they should instead have looked at systems like org mode for inspiration. I also don't understand what you mean by discipline. Yes you need to make sure that everyone has the jupytext extension installed, but that just becomes part of the needed dev environment. After that the whole experience becomes completely seemless.