OP here, if the article seemed to imply that tooling is irrelevant, that was not my intent. The most important part of any system is that it be something you'll stick with. I 100% agree with you that if a system puts you off from taking notes than it's bad for you. (I'd add the nuance that what's off-putting for one person might work well for another)
That said, it's dangerous to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm trying not to spend too much time researching new systems and instead focus on benefiting from the good-enough system I currently have. I moved to my current system when I was feeling the scaling pains of my old one, and when I feel those pains from this system it'll be time to search for an upgrade!
Speaking of upgrades, I don't have a good way to take notes from pdfs. Looking at their site, LiquidText seems like it's optimized for the pdf use case. I'm going to dig deeper into it to see if I can read pdfs and take notes in there, and then export those notes into Evernote. Thanks for the tip!
That said, it's dangerous to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm trying not to spend too much time researching new systems and instead focus on benefiting from the good-enough system I currently have. I moved to my current system when I was feeling the scaling pains of my old one, and when I feel those pains from this system it'll be time to search for an upgrade!
Speaking of upgrades, I don't have a good way to take notes from pdfs. Looking at their site, LiquidText seems like it's optimized for the pdf use case. I'm going to dig deeper into it to see if I can read pdfs and take notes in there, and then export those notes into Evernote. Thanks for the tip!