> We do not need another competing standard here

I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.

Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.

Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.

You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:

- Task state tracking

- Code execution

- Agenda queries

- Time-based organization

- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things

These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.

When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.