Well, I was mostly piling my own complaints on top of what you said. I also agree that Emacs is wonderful, and I agree that it's great how much power it gives u

Well, I was mostly piling my own complaints on top of what you said. I also agree that Emacs is wonderful, and I agree that it's great how much power it gives us to reconfigure everything. However, that doesn't make it perfect. It's completely legitimate to point out flaws, whether they're actual bugs, subjective annoyances or hand-wavey project-wide things. For example, I think that the Emacs community should embrace starter kits more when encouraging others to get started. Of course there's some truth to the "thrown in at the deep end" and "get to grips with the real, inner-workings" approaches, but at the same time the line has to be drawn somewhere; I doubt many would recommend new starters to compile Emacs themselves. Still, Emacs is certainly not as scary as many make it out to be. This week I was helping out a Haskell programming class of CS students, where the instructions included setting up Emacs and installing haskell-mode (in Emacs 23, so they had to install the package manager first!). Out of a group of 60, only one struggled to do this, and it turned out to be because the sysadmin hadn't installed Emacs on the machine he was using ;)