Many of the comments focus on increasing the friendliness of emacs for new users, and how open-minded the maintainers are to this effort, though they realize in

Many of the comments focus on increasing the friendliness of emacs for new users, and how open-minded the maintainers are to this effort, though they realize in their wisdom that this is not necessarily a valuable goal in and of itself. The newbie issue is a typical red herring and excuse for the maintainers not to face the fact that emacs has huge design problems for all users, not just newbies. For example, the presence of dozens of redundant crappy packages associated to every function, included by default in the distribution (e.g. a dozen word-wrapping packages) means that one is likely to use a substandard tool and have problems. The fact that all add-ons are treated with equal weight means that the command you are looking for is hidden among thousands of commands, most of which are way outside the scope of what I need. The proliferation of buffers, leading to the proliferation of buffer packages used to search through lists of buffers? You have to be kidding me. The customization system in Emacs is not only a throwback to 1980s UI "design" but completely out of control -- all options, no matter how minute, are treated on equal footing even if most of them should be hidden or in subtrees. Not only this, but the customization options themselves are badly named, using quirky terminology which nobody uses except emacs. In short, emacs is thoroughly polluted and needs an environmental assessment and large-scale cleaning project. This has nothing to do with newbies, it has to do with oldies whose dusty, dried-up packages need to be swept into the dustbin of history.