The problem with emacs-based solutions is the speed.

Hasn’t been a problem for me for years. It seems to me that often this argument is based (directly or indirectly) from conditions 20 or more years ago. I think Emacs itself hasn’t changed much (it’s gotten better, but not fundamentally different), but the supporting environments (read: hardware) easily make for a usable experience. There are better poster children for bloat these days.

Can't counter that given I've last used emacs years back.

I suppose I've not tried it in any sort of extreme scenario, but it's not clear to me what dired would be slow at. Functions like copy-file are implemented in C.

My response was from from emacs perspective. Here's a memory usage comparison: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...

Looks like emacs uses at least double the memory.

I guess, but I think somebody using dired would be using Emacs anyway, and dired is unlikely to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Completely agree.