Another thing was that any time someone used my Emacs, they couldn't because it wasn't like their Emacs. You hit the nail on the head. I spent months forcing

Another thing was that any time someone used my Emacs, they couldn't because it wasn't like their Emacs. You hit the nail on the head. I spent months forcing myself to use nothing but Emacs to get past the "this is unfamiliar and therefore hard" stage. My final conclusion after the experience was that Emacs is pretty powerful out of the box but it is absolutely a general purpose environment and you have to meld it to your own workflow to truly unlock its potential. Even though I don't use Emacs these days, one thing I did keep was swapping capslock and ctrl on my keyboard. That is useful for so many other things and I'm never going back.