I must admit I struggle to see the point. A collection of a few snippets would be easier to make than this, and I could use them with less effort right in my code editor too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's a nice idea! If you'd be interested in coming up with a mock-up please send it through to me. My email is on my github page, which is linked in the footer of the new website :)
The original author of Org mode is an astrophysicist. The current maintainer is a Philosopher by study. I've found that the Org community seems to come from a wide range of backgrounds, and is generally quite welcoming.
I think OSS projects are a bit like Companies --- each one has its own culture, and attracts different sorts of people.
If you're interested in getting involved, please don't hesitate to introduce yourself on the mailing list :)
Eh, this seems a bit presumptuous. I'd be more inclined to suggest that the people who code this projects are usually not designers, and they attract other contributors based on the code not any visual design... so as much as it would be nice for a designer to jump in and work on a visual overhaul I'd expect it to be unfortunately uncommon.
Can confirm, this is an org file export. Much of the difficulty here was the hackery involved 'escaping' the restrictions of the generated HTML. For example, take a look at this: "margin-left: min(calc(0px - var(--body-left) - var(--body-padding)), calc(30rem - 50vw - 0.5var(--body-left) + 0.5var(--body-right)))". That took a while, and some head scratching :P
My take: You're not going to be working with some 500 row monster etc. in Org, but if you just want to quickly do something like get the row-wise averages of a table, you can just do that in-place easily. The underlying math engine in Emacs is also pretty fancy, it can do stuff like symbolic algebra which I have yet to see in Excel :)
You can find syntax highlighting + a bit more in a number of editors (see the bottom of the install page), but unfortunately much of the "really cool" stuff is currently only available with Emacs.