I stopped using org-mode for a time after having invested a lot of time in learning all the cool stuff you can do because I felt like it was overkill and I was trying to do too much with it and organizing everything was becoming a chore. If you look at all it can do, it has so many capabilities (outlining, gtd, wiki, blogging, ebook publishing, presentations, time tracking, etc).

Recently, I came back to it just to use for code/programming notes and instead of trying to organize all the code into source blocks I went the other way and added in my own comments and questions in blocks that can be toggled on/off around the code that's there. Now the only org syntax I really use from org-mode is `#+BEGIN:` blocks for comments/questions I can quiz myself on and occasionally headlines when I want to organize something because it's in the way of reading the plain text. If I gave advice to someone new to it it would be to start with just plaintext notes and only add what you really need. You can quickly go overboad once you are trying to figure out how to do footnotes, file linking, exporting w/ images, source code execution, etc.