[asgard1024]

"That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go."

I disagree. It's not true for most IDEs, why should it hold for Emacs? This argument was also raised about Linux, but then Ubuntu came along and proved it was wrong. This seems to me like a religious stupidity - you have to use it for everything or it won't work at all.

My main motivation to use Emacs is org-mode and Common Lisp. That's already real work; although I try to use Emacs for everything, but using it for just one of these things would be perfectly valid use case for many people.

It's not that I wouldn't like to mess with the editor either; in fact I did a lot. But it still was not enough for it to work decently. I will have to try one of the starter packages yet (probably Prelude), though.