I actually like the customize interface. That's not to say it couldn't be better. Something about it is very..... ugly. I think native widgets would go a long w

I actually like the customize interface. That's not to say it couldn't be better. Something about it is very..... ugly. I think native widgets would go a long way to making it look like someone other than a programmer designed it. That being said, it fits the Emacs cross platform philosophy and it's a uniform way to look at settings, change them and get help on them and save them in your .emacs. At some point I went and changed all my random "setq"s in my .emacs (built up over 10 or so years) to the equivalent customize versions and as a result was able to speed up my Emacs boot time by a significant amount (like 8ish seconds down to 2ish). The nice thing about customized variables is that you don't have to load in a mode to set it's variables (loading a bunch of modes during boot was what the slow part was).