Every note-taking app becomes a database, every database app grows notes — and the middle is where they all get worse
Watch the trajectory of any "tool for thought" app and it bends the same way. Notion started as blocks and databases and keeps bolting on simpler "just write" modes. Obsidian started as plain markdown files on disk and has since grown properties, Dataview queries, and now Bases — a database. Roam, Logseq, Tana all drift toward the same overloaded middle: part outliner, part database, part wiki.
The problem is that the middle is exactly where these tools stop being good at anything. What pulled people to Notion was structure. What pulled them to Obsidian was the opposite — plain files, no lock-in, nothing between you and the text. As each app grows toward feature parity with the others, the specific thing that made it worth choosing gets diluted. You end up with five apps that all sort of do everything and none of them cleanly.
My half-formed theory is that "tools for thought" has no natural resting shape, so every app just expands until it hits the same wall: past some point, more capability only means more setup, more decisions, and more of the app itself to manage instead of the actual thinking. Has anyone found one that deliberately stayed on its side of the line — stayed dead simple, or stayed fully structured — and was better off for refusing to converge?
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