I think your best bet would be to start with vscode and work toward what you like about emacs. For me, the only thing emacs has going for it are the plugins.

I think your best bet would be to start with vscode and work toward what you like about emacs. For me, the only thing emacs has going for it are the plugins. If I could get the plugins I use in VSCode I'd never look back. Mainly this comes down to CIDER. But a lot of people have put person-years of work into cider. And it's hard to imagine them embracing vscode. Rather than porting plugins or making an elisp interpreter, if I were passionate enough about it, I would look for a path to being able to run a bridge (as a vscode plugin) to a headless emacs. I have no clue how that would be done, but If I chose to believe it was possible, I would try to write an network based API to emacs as an elisp plugin to start, enabling other front ends as neovim does.