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Stock Emacs and off-the-shelf add-ons are pretty powerful, but I agree that one is really missing something by not writing their own little tweaks. You can learn Emacs well just by starting with this manual and beginning to tweak Emacs to do things you want:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/ Emacs Lisp is very low-friction to start hacking on. There's no SDKs to download, no IDE to install, no developer mode to enable, no project wizard to run, no source tree of template files to start from, no program to attach, no emulator to run, to separate build to run, no sandboxing, etc. You can just start Emacs, and start editing Emacs Lisp expressions and evaluating them, and you can change the code of your running Emacs in a very straightforward way. I initially started by writing little fancy editing features for C and C++ coding (e.g., format my comments a certain way, do a expression transform, etc.), and then started writing to editing modes for my employer's proprietary languages. The public bits are at "https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/". That was my introduction to Lisp hacking, and eventually I gravitated to Scheme. |