You're out of your mind if you think anyone will be paying $15 a month for a note taking application.
Unfortunately, this does not address the core usability issues with Evernote.
- Sync: many times, it takes too long to sync. I want something on my phone, so I will save it on Mac and then get ready to leave but it will take 10-15 minutes to sync to phone. (Even after forcing sync on both devices multiples times)
- Editor: The editor has been stagnant for too long and has lots of issues. Undo does not work reliably if you paste something from other apps, there's no Markdown support.
Also, iOS app is too bloated and generally slow. I have resorted to using Drafts as my note taking app and then saving to EN.
You mention that you have taken notes on the IOS app - I've never done that, so that might be one difference between us.
I do have a paid membership though, and I recently downgraded from Premium to the new $2.70/month "Plus" category. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact to sync speed.
This reminds me of how bad their Firefox extension was for a year or so. They introduced new version of clipper (6) for Chrome, Opera and Safari but Firefox stayed at 5.9 for almost a year. They had a long forum thread about this but took too much time! As a paying customer, I hated that and still feel that for a company with main focus on note taking and clipping, they should have been faster.