I disagree, Emacs customization is a means to an end, to get your personal perfect editor so you can better do the objective: editing texts. Customizing Emacs is not fun (for most of us), is not building Lego, it is a chore we have to go tru to get to the good part that is having a perfectly tuned editor to work with. Having a sane default out-of-the-box-experience wouldn't detract from the Emacs experience, and it is something that is missed.

But then, I'm suspect to talk, I left Emacs almost two decades ago and never looked back, and among other reasons, it was exactly because it was so crappy "out-of-the-box", so every new computer I had to use meant always having to deal with that.