Also a keyboardist, and you can pry my emacs from my cold dead fingers, but I still think it would benefit from a bit more ability to incorporate platform-appro

Also a keyboardist, and you can pry my emacs from my cold dead fingers, but I still think it would benefit from a bit more ability to incorporate platform-appropriate keyboard-driven GUI widgets/arbitrary drawing. For example, if the minibuffer could look like a regular GUI text field + a drop-down menu, or a floating command palette, I genuinely think it would be a nicer experience (and would make it "look more modern" which is not a terrible thing)¹. Similarly for the mode line and fringes. If some of the peripheral elements could be enabled to escape the "everything is a grid of characters" paradigm I think it would be a net positive. ¹I've tried mini-frame, and it's fine, but it's still just a utilitarian grid of text.