I tend to agree with this - Emacs is my daily driver and the way I use it, it's really 1) a tightly integrated window manager/text editor powered by elisp, and 2) a great community providing additional functionality. It would be relatively easy to make something to replace (1) for me, but (2) is tough. I'd love to know how far we could get with an updated editor and rendering system, with backward compatibility for emacs code via some sort of emacs/new-system translation layer - I was really excited for xi-editor for that reason because it seemed like it might be a good platform for those kinds of experiments.