> I just can't seem to make it work for me
Maybe you just don't have sufficient exposure to Elisp. Emacs Lisp is one of the best blackmagicfockery automation tools, you can do tons of interesting things. Just the other day I got sucked into a big, long-going Jira Epic, I just needed to find every single PR in my work GitHub Orgs related to specific Jira tickets. Then I wrote this - https://github.com/agzam/github-topics
Once you learn some Org-mode, you will see how awesome it is to be able to turn just about any kind of data into an outline format - I read HN and Reddit in Org-mode format, keep my notes, my Anki cards, my code experiments, my LLM musings - all in Org-mode.