I tried.
After my impassioned rant about the direct correlation between Evernote's declining quality and rising cost I gave Apple Notes an honest to goodness try.
I exported what I considered to be the 100 or so most important notes out of EN and into Apple Notes and went about my daily business. There were problems almost immediately. Notes freezes for a good 30 seconds every time I open the app, regardless if it's already open in memory or a totally fresh start. When attempting to scroll through the list of notes freezes happen every single time. Swapping between folders also causes freezing. Starting a new note? Same thing. That's just with text. When opening a note with images or attachments the entire app grinds to a halt for almost a minute. Searching was practically hopeless. I'd scroll through to make sure a note was present, then search for it. Nothing. No results. The way Notes handles websites through the Safari share extension isn't ideal either. Where Evernote will clip the entire page making a permanent record of it, Apple Notes simply saves a snippet of the site as a link. If the page ever disappears the note links to nothing. The "feature" of using Siri to add to a note doesn't work 90% of the time either. Dictating text to add to a note almost always leads to "Sorry, you don't have a (insert name here) note" reply. All of this happens on a 2012 MacBook Pro running 10.11.5, and an iPhone 6 and iPad Mini 3 both running iOS 9.3. Hardware's not to blame. Not being able to append to a note using my beloved Drafts and the lack of IFTTT integration are almost dealbreakers by themselves, all other issues aside.
After struggling with this for 72 hours I've had enough. Evernote is far from perfect but at least it works. I know my notes are there and I can find them. That's really all I need from a notes app. Fingers crossed Evernote's price hike will lead to improvement and stop the downward trend the app has suffered from the last couple of years. If not, hopefully the next time I try this there will at least be worthwhile competition.