[swaroop]

The benefit is customization to your needs to make your unique workflow faster. There is a reason people spend tweaking their ".emacs.d" configurations - it just makes them so much faster. For example, I use a light theme in office because I have a glossy monitor and I prefer a dark theme otherwise, so I wrote a few lines of elisp to choose the light/dark theme based on the time of day and day of week. Try doing that in other editors / IDEs / etc. :) Of course, I'm quoting a trivial example here, but this is a glimpse to what is possible.