I use Emacs since about five years straight, every day, and have used it on and off before, and have quite some Elisp in my .emacs.d, and can say that you're totally wrong on this. Yes the language has problems, the API, having been there since many decades ago, has quirks, but not more than most of the common languages out there, JS, C/C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, what not. What modifies the global state (mark, match, etc.) is well defined, and you can avoid learning it unless you're sending patches or maintaining your own packages. And dealing with programming languages' idiosyncacies is our raison d'etre anyways.