I think one reason why people don't know about the emacs package manager is a lot of people know emacs from Linux servers, many of which run ancient versions of

I think one reason why people don't know about the emacs package manager is a lot of people know emacs from Linux servers, many of which run ancient versions of CentOS (for "reliability"). I ended up installing my own version of emacs in my home directory because the installed version in /usr/bin is 23.1.1.