Marcin Borkowski (mbork) does a lot of writing and, of course, uses Org mode for most of it. The hard part, he says, is not the writing but the editing. In particular, he’s talking about the emphasis markup. If he wants to write a word or region in bold, that’s easy. He merely starts and end it text with a star. Making a word or region bold after the fact—in the editing phase—is more difficult. You have to locate the beginning of the text, add a star, move to the end of the text, and add another star.
Mbork, of course, soon discovered the solution: org-emphjasize. All you need to do is highlight the text and specify the markup character. The problem is that the binding for org-emphasize, Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+f, is difficult to type. Mbork solved that writing a function to call org-emphasize with an argument * to cover his most common use. But then he bound it to Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+8, which strikes me as just as bad, although you don’t have to specify the *.
My solution for this is to use surround.el that I wrote about here and Bozhidar Batsov wrote about here. I have it bound to Hyper+’ so it’s easy to call. I suppose you could even do as mbork did and write a specialized function for a heavily applied use case.
One thing for sure, mbork is right about markup being harder to deal with when editing.