Making Emacs popular again

To put that another way, my ~/.emacs, which does nothing extraordinary, is over 500 lines. Most of which is activating packages or making settings which should be on out-of-the-box. The amount of boilerplate programming needed to get liftoff is only exceeded by Cisco IOS router configurations.

The basic keycodes not matching common practice is an issue, and one which needs resolving out-of-the-box, not with some magic setting. There's nothing wrong with the current Emacs keycodes, they just lost mindshare. Many user's can't even press all the Emacs key-codes, as their operating system has other ideas about those modifier keys.

There's nothing wrong with Emacs LISP *except for* when ~/.emacs starts to be a LISP program rather than simple statements which can be set via the GUI.

The huge kludge to make Emacs work on GUIs needs careful surgery because its shortcomings hurt every time GUIs change to accommodate new hardware -- such as HiDPI. Libreoffice is a great model of how to do such surgery on a huge codebase. Part of the issue here is that package owners are seen as users who can't be disrupted, rather than as projects who can be asked to make changes.