Right but if you implement the rest of the features, you become an org-mode IDE anyway. I don't mean that's a bad thing, syntax is just bare minimum, most usefulness comes from interactive developer experience anyway. I was just addressing the point parent raised that marrying markup with IDE is a bad idea, and that when it comes to syntax org-mode is hardly underspecified compared to other markup languages.

Would it be neat to have an alternate complete implementation of org-mode elsewhere? Sure. But unlike say Photoshop, Emacs is already open and extremely hackable. That mitigates most of the reasons you would want to.