There are several attempts -- some more, some less successful -- to refactor, improve, and extend Emacs as a platform and editor. (One of the more interesting ones, in my opinion, is GuileEmacs, which is an attempt to use Guile Scheme as a replacement for Emacs Lisp.) Here is a good list of things you might be looking for:
You have a funny definition of vaporware. There's active work happening in public in the neovim repository, and a summary of the work to date here: http://neovim.org/news/2014/june/
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations