@Chris Maughan I just added the focus shortcut, and it seems easy enough to maintain so I'm going to keep it. However, I still find the separate app incredibly valuable. It might be that my short-term memory is particularly sensitive. Just seeing something else on screen often causes me to forget what I was going to write (in combination with kids screaming in the background, 3 other things I recently looked at or thought about, etc., etc.)
In fact I just ran into a situation where I wanted a blank slate even to query existing data. I go into WhatsApp looking for a travel itinerary my mother sent me, and get distracted by a message from someone else. So maybe I want a (third?!) shortcut that opens on the whole app but without any open files. But then I'm going to end up creating new notes from there, and end up with complex layouts. Then I'm going to have multiple such layouts and need a session abstraction to manage them.. we'll see how far down this rabbit hole I go 🤷♂️🏼