So I hear you say 2 things:
- I don’t like the document level sharing model
- I don’t want to work with documents and folders
I think the latter is easy to solve: don’t. With Dynalist you have virtually everything WorkFlowy offers – plus a bunch of features on top of that. But you don’t have to use any of those features. Don’t like documents? Don’t use them. Collapse the file pane. Solved.
The former is harder to solve because sharing on the bullet level isn’t in the near or maybe even distant future. Dynalist believes strongly in sharing on the document level. If I’ve learned anything from software, it is that you best learn to work with what is. In your case I would simply develop workarounds.
As for the design paradigm behind this, and whether a 2 pane outliner could also be done by showing certain levels of one large document, like Noteliner used to do, is a bit of a moot point. Dynalist works with as many, or as few, documents and folders as you want – and that is Dynalist. To argue it should be different is arguing the product itself should be different. Like going to the Evernote forum and saying that it makes no sense how their notes don’t behave like a mindmap.
How long have you been giving this a try? My first run at Dynalist was…unpleasant. I lived in WorkFlowy before and everything you mention, I did too. But giving it another run, just working with it instead of against it, I really have grown to like it the way it is (minus the sharing; I would love bullet sharing!).
Just give it a go, maybe do drag out 1 or 2 major bullets from your main flow into their own documents, and see if it really sucks. If so – then WorkFlowy might be your better bet.