[iLemming]

Emacs is just old. Its foundations (as in the general design) are truly fantastic. I still don't understand how the heck not a single other editor over so many years has even considered replicating ideas like indirect buffers. That alone is a truly brilliant idea, and there are so many more.

Performance is atrocious today. At some point, a couple of decades ago, it might have been considered superb, but some may still remember "8 megabytes and constantly swapping". Emacs can be slow, yet its keyboard latency is still better compared to some other, more modern tools.

I'm not disagreeing with you, Emacs can be so damn annoying, and yet paradoxically remain enormously useful. Sadly (or otherwise), there's still no meaningful alternative to it, nothing even comes close. Lem has a promising story, but I remain skeptical. I think Emacs gets core C improvements sooner than Lem reaches meaningful, practical parity, although I might be wildly wrong in my prediction simply because I don't understand the scale of entanglement of the C-written core of Emacs, yet surely it's probably easier than porting the gigantic body of Elisp in existence to work in Lem.

I can't really comment on RMS' software developer skills - I have never directly reviewed his code. Perhaps, in modern times he'd be considered a "no hire", because being a software developer today requires a little bit more than just being a brilliant code writer.