Org mode is a markup language in the same way as Emacs is just an editor. Both are true but do not tell the whole story. Org is a plain text application framewo

Org mode is a markup language in the same way as Emacs is just an editor. Both are true but do not tell the whole story. Org is a plain text application framework built on top of Emacs platform. My favorite is Org Babel (jupyter notebooks on steroids) that can be used for literate programming that you mentioned (reproducible research, devops-y tasks). Publishing is just one of many applications. There are certainly cases where you might want a more specialized tool.