[rtpg]

I think Emacs is appealing to those who want to quickly write customizations to their text editor.

When working on certain projects, I'll sometimes write a code snippet of elisp to handle some task I find myself doing a lot (things like "fold all fragments of this bespoke file format which includes some string"). The fact that Emacs Lisp is a "real programming language" is nice, and the way that it's very easy to inspect what a certain key command does means that you can very quickly set something up.

This lower barrier to entry is nice for people who really want to make things very close to right. Things like "set up a custom error checker based on this validator command and add highlighting to the text based on it" is as simple as setting up something in flycheck and setting up some regular expressions.

So I think it's interesting for people who like IDEs but want it to be easier to mold and understand, more than people who have a simple text editor but want "more".