This is a good example of my frustration. The solution you suggested allows you to change how an existing emphasis character appears in emacs, but does not allow you to add a new emphasis character. Not great if you still want to be able to use all the old emphasis characters.
To add highlighting without interfering with an existing emphasis character, you're stuck with some ugly hacks (of which I tried a few before giving up). Apparently the reason for this particular limitation is so that org-mode has a consistent syntax for parsing outside of emacs (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-02/msg...). I don't care about parsing outside of emacs (and even if I did, it doesn't seem too terrible to just have my custom emphasis character get printed to the screen without the appropriate formatting). A truly malleable system wouldn't make it so hard for me to modify it to my liking based on my particular needs.
I was able to consistently get emacs/org-mode to work sorta how I wanted it to, but it was _always_ hacky and clunky.
This is a good example of my frustration. The solution you suggested allows you to change how an existing emphasis character appears in emacs, but does not allow you to add a new emphasis character. Not great if you still want to be able to use all the old emphasis characters.
To add highlighting without interfering with an existing emphasis character, you're stuck with some ugly hacks (of which I tried a few before giving up). Apparently the reason for this particular limitation is so that org-mode has a consistent syntax for parsing outside of emacs (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-02/msg...). I don't care about parsing outside of emacs (and even if I did, it doesn't seem too terrible to just have my custom emphasis character get printed to the screen without the appropriate formatting). A truly malleable system wouldn't make it so hard for me to modify it to my liking based on my particular needs.
I was able to consistently get emacs/org-mode to work sorta how I wanted it to, but it was _always_ hacky and clunky.