Set up org-roam for evaluation, but when it came time to actually do research, the thought that has already gone into Roam UX won me over. Everything is theoretically replicable in elisp, and there are key bind related bugs in Roam that would be an instant fix in emacs, but "good enough and works right now" beats "could be perfect with weeks of fiddling".
Standout features: referencing ideas is zero friction, whether they exist or not. Universal search works. Editing note titles fixes all references. Days being a first class citizen, where daily prompts thread your notes together and you can reference future dates to have the backlinks show up on that day, is genius.
Same thing happened to me. I was using org-mode for GTD and note-taking for the past six months. I shifted all my notes to org-roam with links between them. But then I tried roam, it's UX really won over me.
One thing was accessing my notes with all roam features in all the devices. I don't have to setup dropbox/syncthing/whatever in every machine I own and install emacs with my settings every time. And mainly mobile, If I use orgzly, I don't get any benefit of org-roam in it. So I gave up and embraced roam cloud.
I think there is a huge gap to be filled for a device agnostic emacs that works well on mobile (touch), browser, native and is programmable.
Standout features: referencing ideas is zero friction, whether they exist or not. Universal search works. Editing note titles fixes all references. Days being a first class citizen, where daily prompts thread your notes together and you can reference future dates to have the backlinks show up on that day, is genius.