[how_gauche]

I don't know dude, I've had new grads recently wholesale switch to Emacs just after watching me work for five minutes. "Holy crap, why are you editing these programs so much faster than me?"

Completely agree that out-of-the-box Emacs experience is NOT where it's at. I have twenty years invested in tweaking it to minimize keystrokes and operate faster for my use cases. Just remember that Emacs is not actually an editor, it's a Lisp Machine OS you can use to build an editor out of parts

Also keep in mind that alternate distros like Spacemacs are the way Emacs has to evolve, because making drastic structural changes to defaults would break so many user scripts and packages -- the things that provide most of the long-term value proposition of using Emacs in the first place.