I’ve been using Obsidian for a long time. I enjoy it and all of its extensions. However setting up the app and syncthing on all of my systems gets irritating.
Any way, after a little looking around, I found Trillium notes. It doesn’t quite have all the extensions, but is easier to setup. Give it a look, see what you think
I agree that it could be nice to have an app that just points at your instance with a more intuitive UI.
I like the idea of using bookstack, don’t know what it is, but I just can’t get into using it.