Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

I see a lot of comments arguing that it's not "worth it" to spend dozens of hours to "get into org-mode" when there are "intuitive tools" such as Evernote or Trello or Todoist etc. What some are missing is the fact that low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage. After (!) one has sunk thousands of hours into them. I used to keep my academic notes in Evernote and it turned into hell…

Was amazed by the diagrams. Then the author says the source - http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/ !! Now - does anyone know how we can create those diagrams from state flows? e.g. a -> b; a -> c; c -> b; becomes /---\ /---\ | b |<--| c | \---/ \---/ ^ ^ | /---\ | +-| a |-+ \---/ I remember there being a perl library for it. Are there any other nice authoring mechanisms that don't involve intricate text crafting?