Understanding the VT state machine and all its quirks and inconsistencies is not high up in my list of code I'd like to learn. It is good it is packaged up in a library and emacs is just a consumer of it.
libghostty will have excellent compatibility and features rather than an elisp implementation that maybe half baked.
I stopped living in the world of turtles all the way down. Now I'm more like, hey is this is good library ? Is it integrated well ? It does not matter if it is in zig, rust, c++, lisp, scheme, ...
Even 9front has something like 9p, namespaces and everything it's truly a file. Even GNU/Emacs under Hurd doesn't have its full power developed until the GNU people ditch Gnuplot for their own GNU-born capable 3D plotutils and the like.
And today given the speed of jitted Emacs if I were the Calc maintainer I'd try to write a PNG/farfbled (or whatever it's called) plotting tool in pure Elisp, with both TTY and graphical outputs.
Depending on non-GNU, external tools it's holding GNU and Elisp back.
- Purged are gnuplot dependencies with a custom and actual GNU bound 3d plotting software. GNU calc for Emacs should have been working with core Emacs libraries long ago.
- Plotutils extended for 3D should have been mandatory long ago
- GNU made Texinfo not be Texlive dependant for PDF/HTML output. Texinfo should have been standalone a la mandoc it's under Unix for PDF output.
This is a bit of a wishlist without much grounding in how these tools actually work.
Emacs doesn't "depend" on gnuplot in any meaningful sense. org-babel can use it, but it's optional. The request for "custom and actual GNU bound 3d plotting software" is vague to the point of being meaningless. What would that even be? Gnuplot is already GNU-adjacent and works fine.
calc.el is already bundled with Emacs and has been for decades. It doesn't need gnuplot at all for its core functionality. You want 3D plotting integrated with calc or something? You can just build one - elisp is not that hard, LLMs these days understand it better than some other, traditional PLs.
Plotutils - is an obscure GNU package that's largely unmaintained. Advocating for it as a "mandatory" dependency in 2026 is puzzling. The project is essentially dead upstream.
Last thing is Texinfo project problem, not really an Emacs one.
You seem to have a bunch of opinions about GNU software purity rather than someone who has hit concrete practical blocks. Emacs is for pragmatists - you either solve a problem on the spot (without complaining about the purity of the solution); ask if someone done that already and use an existing package; or just put a TODO note in a .org file and deal with that later.
I used to have a Xerox Lisp Machine in the 1980s and dreamed to have Emacs be the ‘catch all’ environment like a Lisp Machine. Now I mostly just use Emacs to edit code.