Sure, stuff can go wrong with Emacs! I don't know anything about Spacemacs... but what I mean is that Emacs invites people to learn about the system, study its

Sure, stuff can go wrong with Emacs! I don't know anything about Spacemacs... but what I mean is that Emacs invites people to learn about the system, study its source code, change it, and fix stuff—whereas Xcode is completely proprietary, so that when things don't work there is literally no way to do anything about it except ask Apple to please fix it.