Toward a "modern" Emacs

As a long time casual Emacs and bash user I don't mind the GNU style keybindings, but discoverability is still bad. I often fail to find options which probably are there, but they aren't easily visible and I can't be bothered enough to search for them. Another issue is Emacs Lisp. I do know Scheme, but back when I looked at elisp it just seemed odd to me and not worth the effort to learn, so I'm probably missing out on a lot of the power in that regard as well. Is it that I like the concept of Emacs, but not the implementation?