I speak only for myself and not the Emacs team, but ... IMO it shouldn't do this by default - unless there is a clear "winner" among all the choices.

IIRC, for eglot I had to install a Python language server. There are a bunch of them. Why would I want it to pick one by default?

I don't know if Emacs will ever have an IDE with TS and LSP working "out of the box" without some configuration. From my experience with Eglot, if it were enabled by default, it would confuse the heck out of some users who just want to, say, edit a Python script.

There are always opinionated releases like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs that can set whatever nice defaults you think should be there. Leave vanilla Emacs to be, well, vanilla. Emacs, while it can be a decent IDE, is not an IDE and shouldn't default to being one.

“ask” mode for installing tree-sitter grammars is the default setting. Tree-sitter modes broadly aren’t enabled by default, but that seems at least consistent with eMacs defaulting to very few modes enabled by default.

Rendering Org in markdown is a solved problem, but wanting Markdown as the source is nuanced. It's difficult to achieve because there's no single agreement or convention - Org is not just markup syntax, its headings have records with types slots: TODO keyword, priority, tags, properties drawer, clock entries, etc. - Markdown has none of this. A CommonMark heading is a line of text; the spec does not even define a subtree, so folding, refiling and archiving need tree semantics layered on top.

So, you need to invent slots. Logseq did exactly that - all the org-mode specific lines get lifted verbatim into .md. Obsidian did it differently with emoji fields or Dataview inline fields (or whatever they called). Neither produces portable Markdown. GitHub renders those files as literal noise. The portability benefit that motivated the move evaporates the moment you add the metadata you need.

And then you'd have to build a specialized parser - there's no equivalent of `org-element` for Markdown. Sure, tree-sitter helps to some extent, but you're still lacking a semantic layer that turns nodes into records.

In essence - for Emacs to treat Markdown as Org-mode, we need to change Markdown, once that happens (if ever) Emacs can follow. But at this point it is already such a mess, it's crazy. Take front-matter alone - it's not CommonMark, it is a Jekyll convention that each tool does differently, and it is per-file, so your unit of thought is limited to become a file. That is the Obsidian/Denote/zk design, it works - but it moves your outline into the filesystem. You lose refile, subtree archive, narrowing, cut-and-yank of a subtree, and "this TODO belongs under that project heading". Org gives you both: file keywords at the top, property drawers on every heading, with inheritance down the subtree that front-matter structurally cannot express.

Markdown didn't even exist when org-mode was first developed and released with many of the features you describe. But also, once you start extending markdown to support all these things you start getting something that's not markdown, it's markdown-based but something distinct since you'd rapidly lose compatibility with other markdown tools if you start incorporating custom annotations into it.

That's actually not a bad mindset, especially when lisp can be vibed so easily. I could actually see myself building out my own library that does the things I want over markdown.

- have it look through all md files in a directory, collect all the todos into a main view

- look for items tagged with a date

- support customer tagging, and provide workflow exports for each one...

- behind the scenes git management for files

- etc...

I've been wanting to build a collaborative markdown editor for awhile now, making it so that different front-ends could work with it is an interesting thing to think about....