Had a similar experience, tried to switch to Meow twice, it's really nice in most ways.
But I found lack of vim-style repeat and accidental "dropping" the selection to be so unwieldy that I couldn't stick to using it.
Ended up writing an alternative to Meow which addresses the issues I had.
This has also been going in in Libraries in Australia.
Go to the library - toddlers Rush to play on the computer.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.
Something they missed out with the GitLFS cons is authentication, if you don't use SSH-agent, pushing involves authenticating multiple times, sometimes more than 2-3 times in my experience.
I remember downloading it from my library on a floppy disk (hoping the librarian wouldn't hear it the floppy drive working - since it wasn't allowed). :)
It's in fact still quite small if additional 3rd party libraries are disabled.
It's possible to make a much smaller download that removes OpenCollada, FFMPEG, OpenEXR, OpenImageDenoise, OpenVDB ... etc. However it's a hassle to distribute a second version at a time when the current size is manageable for most users.
ORG's tightly integrated into emacs & it's ecosystem. It's fine but I don't think there is an equivalent to Sphinx for large cross referenced documents, with different outputs formats & support for translations (different languages).
Perhaps some of these things exist - I may be wrong, if they do I doubt the system is as mature or well supported as Sphinx's.
Strange that everyone seems to think it's simpler, it seems might be a web-developer bias here.
I'm not a web developer and I don't find markdown especially easy/pretty/simple... I find it annoying when the same markdown can't be used in different places based on the rendering engine and there aren't standard ways to extend it.
Also, having trailing whitespace as part of the spec.. tsk!
I've written a few Sphinx extensions ... it seemed OK to me, a bit awkward but long term - this is the kind of thing you do rarely & use often, so how nice it is to write extensions is barely an issue.
I've been using emacs as my main editor for years now and don't find the startup speed to be an issue - to the point I've never bothered with emacsclient:
Once this is working, is there a simple way to switch voices with the default downloaded models? Or does this require downloading other models or generating them?
The down side of this is you have to remember them, for some time now I've been writing with n-gram auto-completion based on a large body of text (including code-comments for projects I work on), see https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/emacs-mono-complete
I have it configured to be enabled when typing in code-comments or commit logs & it often gives helpful suggestions.
This has enough font support to be useful, but doesn't provide scrolling, tabs etc... similar in scope to ST.