The fundamental difference in your analogy is that the table saw is a single use tool optimized for precisely one thing. It requires little maintenance or train

The fundamental difference in your analogy is that the table saw is a single use tool optimized for precisely one thing. It requires little maintenance or training (compared to emacs, anyway) and has been optimized for this one thing so much that it's hard to imagine something that is faster, safer or more reliable. The same cannot be said of Emacs. It is a general purpose tool on a rapidly evolving platform. Its C interpreter is starting to show its age, it requires some tinkering (and many outside tools) to interact with on mobile devices and as the world moves on it feels like it's trying to keep up with specialized tools. I'm an Emacs user, but I will also argue that the comparison with a table saw is not a fair one.