I am a big time note taker. As a chef, we always have a notebook on hand. I have dozens from my years in the trenches. Sometimes I think about digitizing them. Then I remember that I just bought a new whiskey that I want to try.

I have been playing D&D for almost 30 years now. I have boxes and binders and folders full of notes. Stacks of notebooks, large and small, filled with details of created worlds, plot hooks, and ideas for devious traps and puzzles, etc.

Then I have the digital notes. I have a few folders on my desktop with around 1,000 original documents in them. As far as digital notes go, I just use a word processor. LibreOffice, in my case, because fuck Word. I set up some custom templates for the types of notes that I commonly take (e.g. recipes, menu ideas, types of evil organizations). I organize them in the traditional Windows folder/file hierarchy. It works well for me. Like you, I tried Evernote and, like you, I was unimpressed.

I also made a private subreddit just to act as a compendium of things I want to take note of. The subreddit is not ideal. The 6 month limitation on active posts is quite limiting. Sometimes I even post things to Hubski so that I have easy access to it for later reference.